Worth Burning

Name: Worth Burning
Brand: Black Lawrence Press
Price: 43.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

By: Mickie Kennedy

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Paperback | 24 February 2026

At a Glance

Paperback
80 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.5 x 13.9

Paperback

$43.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $10.94 with

Available: 24th February 2026

Preorder. Will ship when available.

A searing portrait of survival,Worth Burningtraces 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 Burningcrackles 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.

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