Worth burning / poems by Mickie Kennedy

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kennedy, Mickie, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--21st century.

American poetry.

Genre:

poetry.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

89 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

[New York] : Black Lawrence Press, 2026.

Summary:

"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"-- Amazon.com.

ISBN:

9781625571816

162557181X

OCLC:

1523031746