Enter to win Worth Burning!

Enter to win Worth Burning! To enter the contest, fill out the form below between Tuesday, February 24, and Tuesday, March 17. Entrants are limited to US residents only and must be at least 18 years old.

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.

About the Author

Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the 2023 Pablo Neruda Prize, he earned an MFA from George Mason University. Follow him on Twitter/X @MickiePoet

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