WINNER of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Mickie Kennedy’s GLANDSCAPES is here!

Read Mickie’s Personal Statement here:

“In 2024, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was the kind of news that rearranges your body, your mind, your sense of time. I turned to poetry—not as therapy, but as a way to stay honest while everything shifted.

Glandscapes came out of that year: diagnosis, scans, side effects, surgery. But it’s not just a cancer book. It’s about sex, aging, identity, and what it means to inhabit a queer body when that body suddenly feels unfamiliar. These poems are messy, intimate, and sometimes funny. I didn’t write them to be brave. I wrote them because I didn’t know what else to do.

Button Poetry helped bring this work into the world, and I’m so grateful. Working with Button Poetry has been an incredible experience—collaborative, thoughtful, and deeply respectful of my voice. From the back-and-forth on edits to the cover design process, I felt fully seen and supported every step of the way. 

Holding this book feels like reclaiming something.“

“Glandscapes is an incredibly moving collection, rich with the kind of up-close intimacy that covers such wide ground — parentage, beloveds, the self, survival and not. It builds a rich interior world that is clear and distinct to the speaker, but not isolating to you, the reader, who might want to walk through that world for a while. This book is a triumph, is massively generous, and also just plainly a pleasure to read.”

Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

More about Mickie:

Website | Instagram @MickiePoet | Facebook @MickiePoet | Twitter @MickiePoet

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. Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.

"I could tell he wished I knew.
I told him about the kids, about Randy.
Six months later, his obituary.
No service, no cause of death.
He never mentioned a lover, or the night
we slept together, all those years ago,"

- Final Snow of the Season, Glandscapes
Purchase Glandscapes Here

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