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Joy Is My Middle Name

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Joy Is My Middle Name

By: Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Narrated by: Sasha Debevec-McKenney
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About this listen

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.

©2025 Sasha Debevec-McKenney (P)2025 Sasha Debevec-McKenney Art & Literature Authors Poetry United States World Literature Funny Witty

Critic reviews

‘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. August Wilson, Jenny Holzer and Amish girls make cameos. 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.’ — Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin ‘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 a 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 ‘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 Self-Tanner for the Soul
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There is so much humour and lived experience in these poems. I feel like I’m getting to know the author personally also the housewife tagline poem, really highlighted the class differential of these ladies.

I don’t even like poems but these are fantastic

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