WORTH BURNING
“I feared AIDS,” Kennedy’s speaker declares bluntly in the opening poem, “and Cindy feared / being alone, so we forged a compromise” (“The Pact”). The speaker fulfills his role of heterosexual husband to Cindy quasi-dutifully, killing “dozens, then hundreds” of beetles to maintain his “aggressively healthy” roses and grilling brats in the backyard (“Beetle Graveyard”). But the actual orientation of his desire is clear—he covertly meets up with his gardener at an airport hotel (“Sheraton by the Airport”) and grows erect as he watches a man in a public restroom “piss[ing] loud, full throttle, a mist / of drops against his legs” (“Oasis”). Kennedy moves deftly from Cindy’s salt-craving pregnancy (“Having It”) to the speaker’s own childhood, a time of profound confusion and disorientation. His father is killed by a drunk driver (“Accident, 1982”), leaving him with a brother and a violent, alcoholic mother who sexually abuses him (“Small Bother”). Cruelty and discipline characterize the speaker’s turbulent childhood; he overhears his friend being beaten after the two watch MTV (“Turning the Key”) and receives a black eye from his classmates, which his mother ignores (“Open Secret”). Returning to his adult life, the speaker finds a lover, Randy, and comes out to his mother, who responds with skepticism and denial (“Out | comes”). Kennedy’s clear, novelistic narration is broken up by two poems titled “Mouth of Many Endings”; these are fragmented, abstracted interjections in which “a mother marks the water’s anger / the child failures into length.”Kennedy is at his strongest in passages of acute, glistening physical description. Images jut out at the reader, hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory—a father’s amputated little toe, a “dangling comma” that is “purple // in a frosty jar”; a mother’s backyard “burn barrel” in which a “donut caramelizes / into a small fist.” These objects, defamiliarized yet recognizable in Kennedy’s quasi-prosaic language, stand in for everything that is unsaid and unsayable in the speaker’s life, the sublimated strangeness that cannot be named: “Every house a house / of sin,” the speaker and his mother observe, “besides our own” (“Until We Saw Our Faces”). The speaker’s tenderness for his mother is profoundly expressed in poems like “Snapshot of a Girl Refusing to Smile, 1956,” where he pities her hardscrabble North Carolina childhood and her loneliness, even as he points out that he “never wanted to be her son.” One or two poems hit duller, more expected beats, particularly in the framing poems that provide an entry point for the denser, weirder childhood material. The scenario of the rendezvous with the gardener feels well worn, for instance, and “No Leaks,” a poem about a suicide attempt, is glancing and vague. (“At the hospital, I learned to paint butterflies. / I watched the anorexics pick at their meals.”) The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens.
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WORTH BURNING
Mickie Kennedy
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RELEASE DATE: Feb. 24, 2026
A stark, startlingly beautiful collection.
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A gay man looks back on his complex, abusive Southern childhood in this poetry collection.
“I feared AIDS,” Kennedy’s speaker declares bluntly in the opening poem, “and Cindy feared / being alone, so we forged a compromise” (“The Pact”). The speaker fulfills his role of heterosexual husband to Cindy quasi-dutifully, killing “dozens, then hundreds” of beetles to maintain his “aggressively healthy” roses and grilling brats in the backyard (“Beetle Graveyard”). But the actual orientation of his desire is clear—he covertly meets up with his gardener at an airport hotel (“Sheraton by the Airport”) and grows erect as he watches a man in a public restroom “piss[ing] loud, full throttle, a mist / of drops against his legs” (“Oasis”). Kennedy moves deftly from Cindy’s salt-craving pregnancy (“Having It”) to the speaker’s own childhood, a time of profound confusion and disorientation. His father is killed by a drunk driver (“Accident, 1982”), leaving him with a brother and a violent, alcoholic mother who sexually abuses him (“Small Bother”). Cruelty and discipline characterize the speaker’s turbulent childhood; he overhears his friend being beaten after the two watch MTV (“Turning the Key”) and receives a black eye from his classmates, which his mother ignores (“Open Secret”). Returning to his adult life, the speaker finds a lover, Randy, and comes out to his mother, who responds with skepticism and denial (“Out | comes”). Kennedy’s clear, novelistic narration is broken up by two poems titled “Mouth of Many Endings”; these are fragmented, abstracted interjections in which “a mother marks the water’s anger / the child failures into length.”
Kennedy is at his strongest in passages of acute, glistening physical description. Images jut out at the reader, hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory—a father’s amputated little toe, a “dangling comma” that is “purple // in a frosty jar”; a mother’s backyard “burn barrel” in which a “donut caramelizes / into a small fist.” These objects, defamiliarized yet recognizable in Kennedy’s quasi-prosaic language, stand in for everything that is unsaid and unsayable in the speaker’s life, the sublimated strangeness that cannot be named: “Every house a house / of sin,” the speaker and his mother observe, “besides our own” (“Until We Saw Our Faces”). The speaker’s tenderness for his mother is profoundly expressed in poems like “Snapshot of a Girl Refusing to Smile, 1956,” where he pities her hardscrabble North Carolina childhood and her loneliness, even as he points out that he “never wanted to be her son.” One or two poems hit duller, more expected beats, particularly in the framing poems that provide an entry point for the denser, weirder childhood material. The scenario of the rendezvous with the gardener feels well worn, for instance, and “No Leaks,” a poem about a suicide attempt, is glancing and vague. (“At the hospital, I learned to paint butterflies. / I watched the anorexics pick at their meals.”) The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens.
A stark, startlingly beautiful collection.
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Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781625571816
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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Categories:
ROMANCE |
FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP |
GENERAL FICTION
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THE CORRESPONDENT
Virginia Evans
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RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
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New York Times Bestseller
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
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Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP |
LITERARY FICTION |
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REMINDERS OF HIM
Colleen Hoover
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RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 2022
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
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IndieBound Bestseller
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
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Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Categories:
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GENERAL FICTION
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