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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.
Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his husband and two children. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, The Sun and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from George Mason University. A small business owner, Kennedy has accumulated one of the world's largest horror comic book collections (though he's too afraid to read them after dark). Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
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