Mickie Kennedy: Glandscapes
Glandscapes Book Cover, courtsey of Button Poetry
Title: Glandscapes
Author: Mickie Kennedy
Publisher: Button Poetry
Release Date: September 23, 2025
Formats: Paperback | Ebook
ISBNs: 978-1-63834-206-9 | 978-1-63834-139-0
Short Synopsis: Gut-wrenching winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mickie Kennedy’s Glandscapes grapples with survival and the self. It bares its most vulnerable parts, speaking to family, inheritance, and queer experience—all colored by the lens of illness. When faced with our own mortality, Glandscapes asks what pieces of ourselves are we willing to lose? Who are we without them? Kennedy’s wry humor blends with stark intimacy, bringing us into a narrative rich with love and loss. Glandscapes demands an unflinching gaze as it scalpels through the things we fear the most.
About the Author
Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere. His first book of poetry Worth Burning will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. His Button Poetry Chapbook Prize winning collection, Glandscapes, will be available in Fall 2025.
Early reader reactions or notable reviews:
“Glandscapes is rich with intimacy—parentage, beloveds, the self, survival and not. It builds a distinct interior world that we might walk through. This book is a triumph and a pleasure to read.”
“Rawness and remedy, comedy is the backdrop in Glandscapes’s reflections: the body through cancer, desire, queer inheritance and history, the failures of the medical industry. Kennedy is a master of the unexpected. ”
“The power of Glandscapes lies in its brutality and playfulness, voice brimming with the desire to believe, to live. Brace yourself. Kennedy’s poems give dispassionate, rigorous pleasure—he
won’t flinch when he snaps your neck.”
