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Worth Burning
Coming Soon
February 24, 2026
Black Lawrence Press
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A searing 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.
978-1625571816
Categories: LGBTQ Poetry
Family Poetry
Death, Grief & Loss Poetry
“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
"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