Worth Burning

ISBN: 162557181X

Author: Kennedy, Mickie

Condition: New

A searing portrait of survival, Worth Burning traces a boys 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 novelists attention to character and narrative trajectory, Mickie Kennedy glides through four decades beginning with the random hit-and-run that kills the young speakers father. The mothers 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 speakers 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, Kennedys debut is at once sweeping and intimate, like a love note passed in secret.