Praise & 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.
We meet the speaker as “the perfect husband— / grilling brats in the backyard” in an inconvenient marriage of mutual convenience. He then takes us back to childhood and adolescence, and a family whose complex abuses drag him to the brink of self-destruction.
What saves him, allegorically, is the “plywood perch” he cobbles in the branches of a pecan tree, a place that “smelled like soil, / like locker room funk.” It is the 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 Modern Poetry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Worth Burning
"As a queer variation on 'American Gothic,' Worth Burning is frank in its episodic delivery of family secrets, desires, and transgressions. In detailing the speaker’s progress from abuse to empathy and same-sex joy, these searing poems puncture the family romance in breathtaking fashion. Mickie Kennedy is a remarkable new poet."
Cyrus Cassells
Winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize
“Lavish, hard-edged, Kennedy’s poems explore the beauties and betrayals of family. Worth Burning is unapologetic and life-affirming, balancing the erotic and the everyday, the hilarious and the devastating. No recent book of poems has more lushly rendered a world and the difficult, wonderful people who make it real.”
Richie Hofmann
Author of The Bronze Arms
“Kennedy’s capacious poetry collection, Worth Burning, journeys from silence and loss toward openness and desire. Brave in its rendering. Precise in its concision. “I want my life to fit inside my life,” reveals the speaker. Tender, transcendent, this collection weaves the complexities of the many lives that make up a single life.”
Cathy Linh Che
National Book Award Finalist
“With great precision and wit, Mickie Kennedy proves how the strongest people often use humor as a shield through life’s most devastating moments. Glandscapes is a triumph. Kennedy deftly fuses humor with both rawness and remedy.
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.
This collection faces mortality right in the eye, then swerves us into the artistic: pornography reflects our deepest, dare I say, poetic fantasies; water turns into wine; and our speaker finds the gorgeous even in moments of betrayal. Kennedy is a master of the unexpected.”
Dorothy Chan
Author of Return of the Chinese Femme
Glandscapes
“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
"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
National Book Award Finalist
“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.”
Charles Rammelkamp
Author of A Magician Among the Spirits; review on London Grip
Jess Chua
Award-winning writer/sketch artist
Charles Rammelkamp
Author of A Magician Among the Spirits