Description
“The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens…Images jut out at the reader, hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory…A stark, startlingly beautiful collection.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“The smoldering debut from Kennedy traces his coming of age as a gay man in the 1990s against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, his tumultuous straight marriage, and the trauma of being raised by an alcoholic mother…These poems comprise searing portraits of the poet, his family, and others…This is an accomplished first effort.”
–Publishers Weekly
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.
