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.