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. ​
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? 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 is an incredibly moving collection, rich with the kind of up-close intimacy that covers such wide ground — parentage, beloveds, the self, survival and not. It builds a rich interior world that is clear and distinct to the speaker, but not isolating to you, the reader, who might want to walk through that world for a while. This book is a triumph, is massively generous, and also just plainly a pleasure to read."
Hanif Abdurraqib
Author of A Little Devil in American
and National Book Award Finalist
“The power of Glandscapes lies in its brutality and playfulness, voice brimming with the desire to believe, to live. Brace yourself. Kennedy’s poems give dispassionate, rigorous pleasure—he won’t flinch when he snaps your neck.”
Edgar Kunz
Author of Fixer
“With great precision and wit, Mickie Kennedy proves how the strongest people often use humor as a shield through life’s most devastating moments.
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Comedy becomes the surprising yet necessary backdrop in the speaker’s reflections: the body through cancer, the most human desires of sex, inheritance through the queer identity, a history of lovers and families, and the larger failures of the medical industrial complex.
Kennedy is a master of the unexpected. Glandscapes is a triumph. ”
Dorothy Chan
Author of Return of the Chinese Femme
“The main subject of Mickie Kennedy’s new collection is his prostate cancer, and as the title suggests, he writes about this grim and frightening condition with wit and a gallows humor that is both sad, cathartic and heart-stopping in all senses of the word.”