"Smoking" by Steve Binetti
Book Cover Design by Zoe Norvell
Worth Burning
February 24, 2026
Black Lawrence Press
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An unflinching portrait of survival, Worth Burning traces a boy’s journey from a turbulent Southern childhood—marked by parental abuse, death, and hidden queerness—through the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and finally, towards a rugged self-acceptance haunted by the past.
Worth Burning crackles with the heat of a burn barrel. With a novelist’s attention to character and narrative trajectory, Mickie Kennedy glides through four decades beginning with the random hit-and-run that kills the young speaker’s father. The mother’s mourning curdles, grief becomes addiction, and addiction becomes abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual—as mother and son persist, locked in a monstrously confused togetherness further complicated by the speaker’s hidden gayness, in a small Southern town.
Through searing confession and stark image-making, Kennedy excavates the contours of a life that persistently bends, against all odds, toward a ramshackle wholeness. Suffused with efficient, image-rich narrative poems, Kennedy’s debut is at once sweeping and intimate, like a love note passed in secret.
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Book Cover Design by Coral Black
Glandscapes
September 2025
Button Poetry
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Gut-wrenching winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mickie Kennedy’s Glandscapes grapples with survival and the self. It bares its most vulnerable parts, speaking to family, inheritance, and queer experience—all colored by the lens of illness.
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Kennedy writes with a mix of wry humor and sharp intimacy. You feel him weighing the cost of each loss, each diagnosis, each inherited bruise.
The questions here are simple and devastating. What do we shed to stay alive? What parts of ourselves are we allowed to keep? And who do we become when the old story no longer fits?
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Illness, memory, and desire collide in a voice that refuses to look away. Glandscapes isn’t afraid of the dark. It holds the light anyway. The result is a chapbook that cuts close to the bone and still finds room for tenderness, awe, and the strange joy of being here at all.
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Glandscapes demands an unflinching gaze as it scalpels through the things we fear the most.
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