by Writing Workshops Staff
A day ago
In a recent conversation with The Rumpus, Mickie Kennedy traced the strange afterlife of an image he'd carried for decades: his mother standing over a burn barrel in rural North Carolina, prodding trash into flame with a long metal pipe, watching the fire transform almost everything. Almost. Some stubborn, unburnable piece always refused. That refusal became the title poem — and the governing metaphor — of his striking debut collection, Worth Burning, just out from Black Lawrence Press.
Mickie is a gay writer based in Baltimore County, Maryland. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA at George Mason University, where he studied under Carolyn Forché, Peter Klappert, and Susan Tichy — a lineage of attentive seeing that sounds throughout Worth Burning. A Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the 2023 Pablo Neruda Prize, Mickie has been quietly, patiently building toward this book for a long time. Worth Burning is the unflinching arrival of the collection he was always going to write.
We're honored that his decades-long journey passed briefly through our doors when, in 2024, he joined Lauren Davis's six-week Reading and Writing Plath workshop. Lauren — author of the Plath-haunted chapbook Sivvy, among other collections — was a fitting guide. The territory Plath made canonical (the difficult mother, the body, confession as craft, the music of damage) is also the territory Mickie was already excavating in his own register. Reading Plath in close company, alongside other serious poets, was the kind of deliberate study that helps a writer test his own materials against a master's, and we suspect it was a useful waypoint at exactly the right time.
Worth Burning has been embraced by the literary world with unusual warmth. Kirkus Reviews calls it "a stark, startlingly beautiful collection." Publishers Weekly describes it as a smoldering debut tracing Mickie's coming-of-age as a gay man in the 1990s — set against the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and the long shadow of an alcoholic mother — and praises it as an accomplished first effort. The book has also been blurbed by Diane Seuss, Cyrus Cassells, Richie Hofmann, Cathy Linh Che, and Emanuel Xavier, a constellation of contemporary poets that signals just how attentively Mickie's peers are reading him. Debut poetry collections live or die by their first wave of readers, so we hope you'll buy Worth Burning directly from Black Lawrence Press and pass it along.
Asked in The Rumpus how he gets to the most potent material, Mickie offered the kind of plainspoken wisdom any writer can borrow. He begins in freewrite — rhythm and memory pulling each other into the room — and refuses, early on, to self-censor. "I'm just having fun. I'm riffing," he said. The discipline comes later. In revision, he listens first for the music and only then for the meaning, careful never to lose the initial intensity that pulled the poem into being in the first place. Sectioned poems get organized like little plays. Lyric interludes get rescued from twenty-five-year-old therapy notebooks. Chaos, in his telling, isn't the enemy of craft — it's the raw material craft works on.
What's next? More poems, surely. More readings. And a debut now traveling out into the world, finding its readers one by one — exactly the way the best books always have. You can keep up with Mickie at mickiekennedy.com or on Twitter/X @MickiePoet, and we hope you'll keep an eye out for whatever he writes next. We're proud, in our small way, to have shared a stretch of the road.
Ready to begin your own success story? Whether you're drafting your first poems or shaping a manuscript years in the making, our online creative writing workshops connect you with a generous community of serious writers and the kind of expert instruction that helps real work get made. Mickie's path is a reminder that the right teacher at the right moment matters — and that even decades-long journeys benefit from a thoughtful interval in good company. Yours might be waiting on our roster.
