Overview

Joy Is My Middle Name documents crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasy cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with conversational ease. Humble, giddy, bold, empathetic, subversive, hilarious, lithe - the collection feels like a conversation with your greatest friend, over the best dinner. Full of stories, character, awkward silence, relatable sentiment; the buzz of perfect moments are funnelled onto the page.

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9781804271872

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Reviews

‘Joy Is My Middle Name is a mantra, motto and winking forewarning in this magnificent debut. Humour is juxtaposed with heartbreak; the weird tenderness of an “ankle break support group on Facebook” is juxtaposed with civil war amputees. August Wilson, Jenny Holzer and Amish girls make cameos. A poet with the capacious charms and chops of Sasha Debevec-McKenney comes around once a generation or so: Morgan Parker, Wanda Coleman, Frank O’Hara. Joy Is My Middle Name is bold as hell. It’s revitalising.’  — Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin  ‘Sasha Debevec-McKenney writes funny, beautiful poems – dispatches from the dark side of girl-world – and once I started reading them, I couldn’t stop. She’s a huge talent.’  — Cat Marnell, author of Self-Tanner for the Soul ‘I’ve been itching to read Sasha Debevec-McKenney's debut for years – and boy, does this work of staggering bathos ever deliver. Joy Is My Middle Name is so horny and hilarious that you might not notice at first the incisive political critique propelling every poem, skewering every last shred of American culture from Costco and the death penalty to diet sodas and action movie franchises. I can’t think of a book that zips more nimbly between the quotidian and the historic, or whose paratactic zingers better capture the weirdness of our age: “My chicken sandwich was dry. I was thirteen and this was the third Al Franken book I’d read.” “My backyard is literally a lake. / I literally need a hug. I literally got a master’s degree and felt nothing.” What other book combines wart removal with Eleanor Roosevelt? Where else can you read about e-girls twerking to LBJ in hell? Who else can pack microplastics, adultery, and overalls into the same poem, and make you (literally) cry along the way? No one, that's who. Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the real freaking deal.’ —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets

Author Information

Sasha Debevec-McKenney's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.

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