Overview

Full Product Details

9781625571816

Table of Contents

Reviews

The poems of Mickie Kennedy's Worth Burning are harrowing, authentic, and brilliantly attuned to the deeply observed image. Their flight path is that of a queer coming-of-age at a time when sex was synonymous with death, and a parallel portrait of the artist, for whom poetry is the portal to an expansive erotic imagination. This book is a place of witness and self-discovery that some have the guts, ingenuity, and luck to build from the rubble--in other words, poetry. Kennedy's epic tale burns through these exquisitely crafted poems. Worth Burning is worth everything. --Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry Worth Burning is riveting and unfailingly honest. As a queer text, a fearless variation on ""American Gothic,"" it's consistently frank and cogent in its episodic delivery of family secrets, desires, and transgressions. In detailing the speaker's progress from bullying and abuse to empathy, commitment, and same-sex joy, these searing, X-ray poems puncture the family romance in breathtaking fashion. Mickie Kennedy is a brave and remarkable new poet. --Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems In poems both lavish and hard-edged, Mickie Kennedy explores the stark beauties and startling betrayals of family. His arresting debut, Worth Burning, is unapologetic, life-affirming. Attuned to psychology and with a brilliant ear for zany detail, Kennedy is a masterful storyteller-in-verse, balancing the erotic and the everyday, the hilarious and the devastating. ""I want my life to fit inside my life,"" the speaker declares. No recent book of poems has more lushly and precisely rendered a world and the difficult and wonderful people who make it real. --Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers Mickie Kennedy's capacious poetry collection Worth Burning journeys from silence and loss toward openness and desire. Brave and honest in its rendering, precise in its concision and imagery, the collection is sure and intimate in its retelling. ""I want my life to fit inside my life,"" reveals the speaker. Brilliant, triumphant, tender, and transcendent, this is a collection that brings together the complexities of the many lives that make up a single life. --Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost

""The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens...Images jut out at the reader, hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory...A stark, startlingly beautiful collection."" --Kirkus Reviews The poems of Mickie Kennedy's Worth Burning are harrowing, authentic, and brilliantly attuned to the deeply observed image. Their flight path is that of a queer coming-of-age at a time when sex was synonymous with death, and a parallel portrait of the artist, for whom poetry is the portal to an expansive erotic imagination. This book is a place of witness and self-discovery that some have the guts, ingenuity, and luck to build from the rubble--in other words, poetry. Kennedy's epic tale burns through these exquisitely crafted poems. Worth Burning is worth everything. --Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry Worth Burning is riveting and unfailingly honest. As a queer text, a fearless variation on ""American Gothic,"" it's consistently frank and cogent in its episodic delivery of family secrets, desires, and transgressions. In detailing the speaker's progress from bullying and abuse to empathy, commitment, and same-sex joy, these searing, X-ray poems puncture the family romance in breathtaking fashion. Mickie Kennedy is a brave and remarkable new poet. --Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems In poems both lavish and hard-edged, Mickie Kennedy explores the stark beauties and startling betrayals of family. His arresting debut, Worth Burning, is unapologetic, life-affirming. Attuned to psychology and with a brilliant ear for zany detail, Kennedy is a masterful storyteller-in-verse, balancing the erotic and the everyday, the hilarious and the devastating. ""I want my life to fit inside my life,"" the speaker declares. No recent book of poems has more lushly and precisely rendered a world and the difficult and wonderful people who make it real. --Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers Mickie Kennedy's capacious poetry collection Worth Burning journeys from silence and loss toward openness and desire. Brave and honest in its rendering, precise in its concision and imagery, the collection is sure and intimate in its retelling. ""I want my life to fit inside my life,"" reveals the speaker. Brilliant, triumphant, tender, and transcendent, this is a collection that brings together the complexities of the many lives that make up a single life. --Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost Worth Burning is an honest, unguarded collection about family, desire, and the stories we carry long after we think we've moved on. Mickie Kennedy writes with care and courage, allowing tenderness and harm to exist side by side, the way they often do in real life. These poems honor queerness, damage, and love without trying to smooth them over. This is a book that understands survival as something lived day by day, and poetry as a way to bear witness, hold what remains, and keep speaking with heart and clarity. -Emanuel Xavier, author of Still, We Are Sacred and Love(ly) Child

The poems of Mickie Kennedy's Worth Burning are harrowing, authentic, and brilliantly attuned to the deeply observed image. Their flight path is that of a queer coming-of-age at a time when sex was synonymous with death, and a parallel portrait of the artist, for whom poetry is the portal to an expansive erotic imagination. This book is a place of witness and self-discovery that some have the guts, ingenuity, and luck to build from the rubble--in other words, poetry. Kennedy's epic tale burns through these exquisitely crafted poems. Worth Burning is worth everything. --Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry Worth Burning is riveting and unfailingly honest. As a queer text, a fearless variation on ""American Gothic,"" it's consistently frank and cogent in its episodic delivery of family secrets, desires, and transgressions. In detailing the speaker's progress from bullying and abuse to empathy, commitment, and same-sex joy, these searing, X-ray poems puncture the family romance in breathtaking fashion. Mickie Kennedy is a brave and remarkable new poet. --Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems In poems both lavish and hard-edged, Mickie Kennedy explores the stark beauties and startling betrayals of family. His arresting debut, Worth Burning, is unapologetic, life-affirming. Attuned to psychology and with a brilliant ear for zany detail, Kennedy is a masterful storyteller-in-verse, balancing the erotic and the everyday, the hilarious and the devastating. ""I want my life to fit inside my life,"" the speaker declares. No recent book of poems has more lushly and precisely rendered a world and the difficult and wonderful people who make it real. --Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers Mickie Kennedy's capacious poetry collection Worth Burning journeys from silence and loss toward openness and desire. Brave and honest in its rendering, precise in its concision and imagery, the collection is sure and intimate in its retelling. ""I want my life to fit inside my life,"" reveals the speaker. Brilliant, triumphant, tender, and transcendent, this is a collection that brings together the complexities of the many lives that make up a single life. --Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost Worth Burning is an honest, unguarded collection about family, desire, and the stories we carry long after we think we've moved on. Mickie Kennedy writes with care and courage, allowing tenderness and harm to exist side by side, the way they often do in real life. These poems honor queerness, damage, and love without trying to smooth them over. This is a book that understands survival as something lived day by day, and poetry as a way to bear witness, hold what remains, and keep speaking with heart and clarity. -Emanuel Xavier, author of Still, We Are Sacred and Love(ly) Child

Author Information

Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his husband and two children. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, The Sun and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from George Mason University. A small business owner, Kennedy has accumulated one of the world' s largest horror comic book collections (though he' s too afraid to read them after dark). Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available