Glandscapes, winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, is a chapbook that thrums with raw nerve and queer desire through a gut-wrenching framework of coping with prostate cancer. 

The poet, Mickie Kennedy, has had work appear in POETRY, The Sun and elsewhere, and his first full-length book of poetry will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2026.

As someone who craves emotional texture (whether it’s in the form of poetry, prose, or music), I appreciated how quickly the chapbook went straight into its theme. There was no preamble or soliloquy leading into difficult inner landscapes.

There was no flinching even when the subject matter was tender or quietly devastating. The poet’s voice is often self-deprecating, but never self-erasing. 

Cover Design 

May I just give a brief comment on the cover of Glandscapes, and how visually bold and relevant it is to the contents?

The saturated colors and skeleton in one half of the figure evokes both clinical sterility and the intensity of deeply personal psychosexual experiences. 

The placement of the flowers is a subtle touch as well, alongside the green lines going over the anatomical drawing on the left side (which makes certain sections look like a thumbprint). It invites you to think and wonder about the body and what’s going on inside of it, before you go into the chapbook’s poems.

Emotional Resonance

With chapbooks, I like to feel something quickly, and these poems definitely delivered on that front.

The opening poem, “Masturbating for My Life,” has lots of imagery and layered meanings going on where the poet laments:

If something needs to die,

let it be the bird.

5 “Remedy” poems are scattered throughout the collection, forming something like a hidden spine to themes woven throughout. I loved these for their brevity and focus. “Remedy III” was tragicomedic in its social media commentary, while “Remedy V” reflects on devotion with lines like:

But even when there’s nothing left to touch,

I would let him touch me there.

“Neurostatic Interference” is one of several poems where the poet reflects on his parents. I enjoyed this one for its detached observation of Kennedy being “fourteen when [he] first heard it,” his “mother’s heart closing.” The brief comments between the doctor and his mother show us how his mother’s laugh is “the slam of a thousand windows” in his mind, even though she thinks it “was nothing.”

These sharp observations are woven between humor and sadness.

Queer Desire & Timelessness

Several deeply queer poems stood out to me, the first being “A Body Stuffed With Prayer”:

We didn’t know what we were.

Just friends, behind locked doors,

excavating lust. 

This poem also had the lines “slow, tender, as if we’d been lovers for years” which is such a balm and contrast to sexual experiences that may feel more like a transaction.

In “Closet Case,” we learn about a college friend who ends up saying he’s “married to his job” after staying silent for three years after their encounter.

“Finding My Boyfriend in Bed with a Stranger, 1993” was not of violent rage or jealousy, but of how:

Everything [he] did was beautiful,

even betrayal.

In “Randy Sends Nudes While I Wait for My Cancer to Metastasize,” Kennedy wonders why his partner does it:

Maybe

it’s the storming hormones

of a man in his thirties.

Maybe it’s the promise of intimacy

without the mess

of closeness.

Kennedy also wonders “how good” a man can really be, in between Randy’s sexting with virtual strangers and Randy’s caretaking of Kennedy at home.

Conclusion

One of the poems towards the end, “Today at 2pm My Testosterone Says Adieu,” ends with:

My testes

a vacant hotel. . .I don’t need it.

I need to learn how not to need it.

Which echoes the final lines of the final poem (I’ll exclude it from here to avoid spoilers).

What lingers after reading is the ache of desire’s absence.

It’s the fear or hopelessness that settles in your bones, of being forced to face difficult questions like how to adjust to a life without things like desire that make you feel alive.

➜ Check out Glandscapes via the publisher’s website