About the Book
In her best imitation of a historian, poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney combs through the past. Joy Is My Middle Name is about crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasily through 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 ease.
This remarkable debut collection showcases Debevec-McKenney’s intimate, assured, conversational voice. Full of stories, character, awkward silences, and actual jokes, Joy Is My Middle Name seamlessly traces the author’s search for herself and examines how she gets in her own way, brings humor and lightness to rock-bottom moments, and considers the shamelessly girly as a serious cultural artifact.
All the while, Debevec-McKenney uses her own life to get revenge on the version of American history we’re taught in school. She brilliantly weaves together the political and the personal, maps the interior onto the exterior, and vice versa. Humble, giddy, ridiculous, bold, deep, empathetic, difficult, ragged, strange, erratic, and lithe, Joy Is My Middle Name is the most open conversation with your greatest friend, over the best dinner, the buzz of life’s perfect—and not-so-perfect—moments funneled onto the page.
“My life changed
when I found out what I could do
with my mouth. I licked
it all up, thirsty as any lifelong learner,
any other lover of the last drop,
swallowing everything but
what I had to say.”
—from “WHEN I MET SHARON OLDS SHE TOLD ME TO WRITE A POEM ABOUT LBJ’S PENIS”
About the Author :
Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Yale Review. She was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut.
Review :
"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."
"Joy Is My Middle Name is a mantra, motto, and winking forewarning in this magnificent debut. . . . 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 revitalizing."
"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. . . . 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."
"Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the writer you may have been waiting for all your life. Her poems contain the dizzy complexity of a word that is in pain and in love at once. She is one-of-one—melding humor, beauty, rigor and craft to create poems so sharp that they must be handled with the exquisite care they deserve. Debevec-McKenney is the voice of a generation."
"I have never read a book so deliciously careening and sharpened by its own searching and attentiveness, or so fraught and porous by its humanity and humour. There is a new poetic voice burning brightly in the front yard of America, and whatever gets chucked on the pyre—eath pulling its drawstring, PMSing for a month and half, flirting with a plaque, literally loving someone, a car pulling up playing seagull noises full volume, or throwing away the ice-cream lid to signal your intent to finish it—the lumens and heady fumes only increase. The power of Sasha Debevec McKinney compels you: she is a whole tray of drinks."
