Joy Is My Middle Name

“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“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.” – Maggie Millner, author of Couplets“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.” – Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage“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.” – Jack Underwood, author of A Year in the New Life

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.