Poetry review – GLANDSCAPES: Charles Rammelkamp reviews a grimly frank medical memoir-in-poems by Mickie Kennedy
Glandscapes
Mickie Kennedy
Button Poetry, 2025
ISBN: 9781638342069
$16.00 68 pages
The main subject of Mickie Kennedy’s new collection is his prostate cancer, and as the title suggests, he writes about this grim and frightening condition with wit and a gallows humor that is both sad, cathartic and heart-stopping in all senses of the word. Five of the poems are titled “Remedy.” In the first, “Remedy I,” he writes about the medical professionals.
The surgeon wants me
to remove my prostate.
The upside: my life.
The downside: no more
erections….
In “Remedy II,” it’s the internet:
Reddit wants me
basic. Every day
I’m swallowing seven
teaspoons of baking soda
to vault my pH
above eight. Cancer
struggles to survive,
they say, in a basic
environment.
The same is true of “Remedy III,” which involves a “Happy Prostate Facebook Group”, with its recommendations for a variety of sketchy “remedies” like broccoli sprouts, sea moss and hibiscus tea, all of which scream of the group’s desperation, clutching at straws. In “Remedy IV” we’re back to the medical professionals, the oncologist and his Cyber Knife, and finally in “Remedy V,” it’s his husband Randy who insists on his ‘cumming every day, a frenzy / before the famine.’
With the patience of an attentive nurse,
he helps me arrive,
his finger curling towards the place
my prostate takes me—
a brief obliteration.
Indeed, the very first poem in Glandscapes, “Masturbating for My Life,” comes with an epigraph from a urologist: “Frequent ejaculation may slow the progression of even the most aggressive of prostate cancers.” Yet with his characteristic humor Kennedy notes the straight porn he has lately been using to stimulate his fantasies, featuring a severe German nurse
dispassionately milking a sperm donor,
stroking with the intensity
of a woman who doesn’t flinch when she snaps
a chicken’s neck. I’m trying to match
her furious rhythm, so fast
it burns….
Medical procedures involved with his cancer are front and center in many of the poems. “Neurostatic Interference,” “Today at 2pm My Testosterone Says Adieu,” and “Doctoring His Death” are some of the titles. This final one also involves his father. Kennedy’s parents are also prominently featured in Glandscapes.
Kennedy writes about his father in “Guarding the Coop” and in “Blue Collar,” in which he reminisces about helping out in his father’s store in Eastern Carolina, as a kid. His mother is central to “Vigilance,” another poem about growing up in Eastern Carolina, how she inspected him for deer ticks. In “Doctoring His Death,” Kennedy is talking with the CyberKnife nurse, who has asked after his father. ‘I tell her
he died years ago trying to save
a collie from a house fire. Something
flows between us—pity, reverence.
Of course it’s a lie. He was struck
by a car in front of our house.
Later, confessing that he wanted his father’s death to have more gravity than a prosaic traffic accident, he writes, with characteristic acerbic humor, ‘So it’s less of a lie, and more // of a myth—a better ending….’
Indeed Death, (both his own and others’) is on the poet’s mind throughout. Some of these are presumably from AIDS. In the poem “Cruising,” for instance, a title that refers both to a literal vacation cruise he and his husband Randy are on and also to casual sex, Kennedy writes, ‘I’m swarming with the names
of all the men I’ve lost: Bill, José, Robert. Everything
is salt-glazed—the teakwood slats, the abandoned
loungers. My breaths are brief ghosts, gone
as quickly as they form. Andy, Rick, Carl, Zach.
I wasn’t more cautious than anyone else.
It almost sounds like survivor’s guilt. A lovely set of three poems written for his Uncle Ronny (“Uncle Ronny: A Triptych”) eulogizes a gay uncle he’d known in Eastern Carolina as well. The penultimate poem in the collection, “When I heard of your death,” is an elegy written to a former lover.
Kennedy’s husband appears in half a dozen of the twenty-eight poems that make up Glandscapes. “Morning Wood” is about waking up together in the morning in the knowledge of Kennedy’s condition. (‘Randy plays with his cock while I play dead.’) “Randy Sends Nudes While I Wait for My Cancer to Metastasize” involves another secret Facebook group – Bate Buds. He writes about his husband, ‘Last night, he spent
an hour trying to coax me
into orgasm, then held me when
I couldn’t. Later he knelt down
on the cold kitchen tiles
to sponge my vomit from the grout—
another symptom of the poison
that’s saving my life. How good
can a man really be?
Randy also appears in the last poem, “Dearest Prostate,” which is written, ironically, on Valentine’s Day (‘Today, your first crush / of radiation.’). The medical procedure to eradicate his prostate cancer has begun.
The massager on my nightstand,
gnarled as my mother’s knuckles,
useless now. Randy’s fingers
trained to find you without eyes,
forever caressing an absence.
The poem is a mock elegy, though for all its dry humor, it is no less somber, with a reference to that dead loved Uncle Ronny as well. Echoing Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick in Casablanca, when he tells Ingrid Bergman’s Lisa, ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ Kennedy closes the collection in the ever-mordant witty tone that characterizes this tender, confessional book, noting ‘we will always have Miami,
the daddy with the boomerang curve
and the brass bull ring.
And we’ll always have the first time
we met, the end
of a hairbrush, slickened
with olive oil.
Now there’s an image that’s hard to un-see! The poem – and Glandscapes itself – ends on the line in which he affectionately calls his withered radish: ‘Not gone, just dead.’
Sep 17 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Mickie Kennedy
Poetry review – GLANDSCAPES: Charles Rammelkamp reviews a grimly frank medical memoir-in-poems by Mickie Kennedy
The main subject of Mickie Kennedy’s new collection is his prostate cancer, and as the title suggests, he writes about this grim and frightening condition with wit and a gallows humor that is both sad, cathartic and heart-stopping in all senses of the word. Five of the poems are titled “Remedy.” In the first, “Remedy I,” he writes about the medical professionals.
The surgeon wants me to remove my prostate. The upside: my life. The downside: no more erections….In “Remedy II,” it’s the internet:
The same is true of “Remedy III,” which involves a “Happy Prostate Facebook Group”, with its recommendations for a variety of sketchy “remedies” like broccoli sprouts, sea moss and hibiscus tea, all of which scream of the group’s desperation, clutching at straws. In “Remedy IV” we’re back to the medical professionals, the oncologist and his Cyber Knife, and finally in “Remedy V,” it’s his husband Randy who insists on his ‘cumming every day, a frenzy / before the famine.’
Indeed, the very first poem in Glandscapes, “Masturbating for My Life,” comes with an epigraph from a urologist: “Frequent ejaculation may slow the progression of even the most aggressive of prostate cancers.” Yet with his characteristic humor Kennedy notes the straight porn he has lately been using to stimulate his fantasies, featuring a severe German nurse
Medical procedures involved with his cancer are front and center in many of the poems. “Neurostatic Interference,” “Today at 2pm My Testosterone Says Adieu,” and “Doctoring His Death” are some of the titles. This final one also involves his father. Kennedy’s parents are also prominently featured in Glandscapes.
Kennedy writes about his father in “Guarding the Coop” and in “Blue Collar,” in which he reminisces about helping out in his father’s store in Eastern Carolina, as a kid. His mother is central to “Vigilance,” another poem about growing up in Eastern Carolina, how she inspected him for deer ticks. In “Doctoring His Death,” Kennedy is talking with the CyberKnife nurse, who has asked after his father. ‘I tell her
Later, confessing that he wanted his father’s death to have more gravity than a prosaic traffic accident, he writes, with characteristic acerbic humor, ‘So it’s less of a lie, and more // of a myth—a better ending….’
Indeed Death, (both his own and others’) is on the poet’s mind throughout. Some of these are presumably from AIDS. In the poem “Cruising,” for instance, a title that refers both to a literal vacation cruise he and his husband Randy are on and also to casual sex, Kennedy writes, ‘I’m swarming with the names
It almost sounds like survivor’s guilt. A lovely set of three poems written for his Uncle Ronny (“Uncle Ronny: A Triptych”) eulogizes a gay uncle he’d known in Eastern Carolina as well. The penultimate poem in the collection, “When I heard of your death,” is an elegy written to a former lover.
Kennedy’s husband appears in half a dozen of the twenty-eight poems that make up Glandscapes. “Morning Wood” is about waking up together in the morning in the knowledge of Kennedy’s condition. (‘Randy plays with his cock while I play dead.’) “Randy Sends Nudes While I Wait for My Cancer to Metastasize” involves another secret Facebook group – Bate Buds. He writes about his husband, ‘Last night, he spent
an hour trying to coax me into orgasm, then held me when I couldn’t. Later he knelt down on the cold kitchen tiles to sponge my vomit from the grout— another symptom of the poison that’s saving my life. How good can a man really be?Randy also appears in the last poem, “Dearest Prostate,” which is written, ironically, on Valentine’s Day (‘Today, your first crush / of radiation.’). The medical procedure to eradicate his prostate cancer has begun.
The massager on my nightstand, gnarled as my mother’s knuckles, useless now. Randy’s fingers trained to find you without eyes, forever caressing an absence.The poem is a mock elegy, though for all its dry humor, it is no less somber, with a reference to that dead loved Uncle Ronny as well. Echoing Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick in Casablanca, when he tells Ingrid Bergman’s Lisa, ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ Kennedy closes the collection in the ever-mordant witty tone that characterizes this tender, confessional book, noting ‘we will always have Miami,
Now there’s an image that’s hard to un-see! The poem – and Glandscapes itself – ends on the line in which he affectionately calls his withered radish: ‘Not gone, just dead.’