“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.”