What We’re Reading: Joy Is My Middle Name

A Historical Perspective with Humor and Heart

Poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney combs through the past with humor and curiosity in her new poetry collection out this month. Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo Editions, W.W. Norton) 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.

Sasha will be one of our panelists at the Navigating the MFA Experience College Chat on August 19th, now open for registration. She received her MFA from NYU and is currently a Creative Writing fellow at Emory University.