Joy Is My Middle Name

One of The New Yorker 's Best Books and Essential Reads of 2025 Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award 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”