Joy Is My Middle Name

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

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.

Zusammenfassung
Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize
One of The New Yorker's Best Books and Essential Reads of the Year

A magnificent, radical debut. Poetry Book Society

Hilarious, moving, and accessible, the poems in this extraordinary debut interrogate patriotism in a deeply flawed country.