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Poems
by Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Hilarious, moving, and accessible, the poems in this extraordinary debut interrogate patriotism in a deeply flawed country.
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"
"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 the New York Times bestseller How to Murder Your Life
"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." ―Terrence Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
This information about Joy Is My Middle Name was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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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