Sasha Debevec-McKenney for Joy Is My Middle Name

'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... 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's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review.

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.

'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 - death 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-McKenney compels you: she is a whole tray of drinks: "Joy is in! Let it in!"'

~ Jack Underwood, author of A Year in the New Life