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.
Joy Is My Middle Name
French paperback with flaps, 116 pages
Published 3 July 2025
Joy Is My Middle Name
CENTO FOR THE NIGHT I TRIED STAND-UP
Welcome to the place
where my jokes come from. Please
adjust your expectations, dear reader.
We’ve got a lot of shit to talk
about. I’m happy you’re here.
I need you.
✰
I thought I’d start by sharing
my findings with you,
because knowledge shared
is knowledge halved. The universe began
with a big bang. But before that?
This is the question I asked
myself every night as a child.
Do mountains keep growing?
What’s black and white and red all over?
Can you have a context-free word?
There’s times in your childhood
you could really do with a drink.
✰
You don’t know what to believe—
Taco Bell is selling chicken wings,
better believe something. Better
to have something to believe in.
I’ve seen UFOs split the sky like a sheet.
I believe that there is a God
and He hears our prayers
and is like, “Nah, fuck that.”
✰
We’re all guilty of something.
We don’t even believe
in Heaven, but we’re going.
How does this microphone
work? None of us know,
none of us know. None of us have ever known.
Look: some of this show is gonna be grim.
And I ask you: why does everything
have to be so good? I adore
a two-star experience. I think we all
have to ask a very important question
(and do try and be honest with yourselves
as you answer): if you had an invisible hand,
what would you do with it?
✰
I’ve been trying to trace
back my addictions.
What was my first addiction?
Whenever I investigate a smell,
the answer is always bad.
I can feel it in the room tonight.
I can feel it in the air,
I can taste it in the sky.
✰
Tipsy is the best thing you can be
in life; tipsy. There’s four things you can be
in life: sober, tipsy, drunk, hungover.
Tipsy’s the only one of four
where you don’t cry.
It’s warm and you’re watching the sun
come up through the windshield.
And you see those stars up there,
and they’re not even there,
it’s just … we’re finally seeing
the light from those stars.
✰
People get the wrong idea about me.
They think I’m depressed or something.
I’m not depressed.
I bought a fourteen-dollar bar of soap once.
Three weeks ago, I put “nachos” in
as an Uber destination.
I was just recently named one of the top
five funniest people in America.
I suck at love. I love to party.
And I’m looking for a husband. Emotionally,
spiritually, genetically, historically,
I want to be a trophy wife. I may be dumb,
but I know right from wrong.
I do my judging silently.
Sometimes I go to the batting cage
just to play catch, as cute as I wanna be.
I’m jealous of people who get to meet me.
I have color headshots, 11 × 17;
I stand out in a pile.
✰
I can play archetypes or weather systems
but I can’t play people. Orbiting
the earth, able to view the entire span
of human culture and existence and yet,
just because you have a thought
or a feeling, doesn’t mean
it is always necessary
to express it. That’s the real miracle.
✰
People tell you life is short. No,
it’s not. Life is long. Especially if
you make the wrong decisions.
Somewhere over the rainbow
I bet life is just as exactly as hard
as it is on this side of the rainbow,
and on that side, you can’t even see
a rainbow. There is nothing
you can do to us that we are not already doing
to ourselves. Should have warned you
earlier: some jokes are sad.
✰
Life is fucked up. Don’t get me wrong,
there’s brilliant bits, like when
you see someone you haven’t seen
in a while, or get drunk unexpectedly,
or go for a cycle with the wind
behind you, or read a book
that’s incredible, or you go
to an unbelievable show,
but very often when you get back
outside, you find that someone
set your bike on fire.
✰
Isn’t there a part of you
that wants to die in the apocalypse?
All I’m saying is: if we all die
at the same time, it’s like nobody died.
It’s easy being dead. The hard thing
if you’re a comedian
is to stay alive. I’ve monetized
a personality defect.
Do you guys like impressions?
Yeah? You do? Okay, good.
This is my impression
of a person doing impressions.
✰
I’m hiding nothing from you,
you guys are wonderful;
I’ll tell you a personal story.
I went for a run the other day.
I accidentally swallowed a fly.
I had to google, “How many calories is a fly?”
I thought health equaled happiness
but that is not true. I know what you’re thinking,
and the answer is: you can’t put the genie back.
✰
I’m not really here
to make people accept their flaws.
This is just how I look.
Can I recommend that instead of war
to feel better about yourself,
perhaps, sit ups? Maybe a fruit cup?
Six to eight glasses of water a day?
I’m not telling you how to live,
I’m just recommending perhaps
a better way to feel better
about yourself. I want to make
a jigsaw puzzle that’s 40,000 pieces
and when you finish
it says: go outside.
✰
There’s no easy way of saying this:
we cannot, of course, harm
the president of the United States—
but it is not illegal to lead him
into a bramble, some uneven pavement,
rocky terrain. At its best,
America has never been
about facts. It’s been about belief.
It’s about looking at a fact
and saying, “No. No,
I don’t think so,”
with all the confidence of a dog
running away from its own farts.
✰
I’m almost embarrassed to tell you
this: I’m supposed to want kids.
I don’t know if I do.
I’m 30. I heard when you’re a girl
and you’re 30 you’re just like,
I need a baby—but I don’t want
to make anything with my body.
I don’t need another reason to be hungry.
You ever go to throw a frisbee
and it’s immediately sideways?
Can’t have those moments back.
✰
A book walks into a bar
and sees a bookcase.
Everybody’s trying to find
somebody. Let’s form a club!
Who loves you?
Who do you go home to?
Aren’t you sick of talking about it?
✰
Who here is in their twenties?
Leave your potential
alone. You’ll screw it up,
don’t look at it. Leave it there.
It’s like your bank balance—
you always have less
than you think. In your mind
you think of potential as an unlocked door
within yourself; if you open the door
you’ll see this wonderful palace,
gleaming marble floors, these endless
drapes, flamingos serving drinks
to elegant men and women arrayed
on chaise lounges exchanging witticisms,
somewhere between a wish
and an observation. But who
has time to enjoy a robe?
✰
I hate to end on a sad note.
What am I gonna leave you guys with?
“Wagon Wheel?”
We’ve had a good time.
We’ve laughed a lot.
We’ve learned a little.
You can spend
a decade on the wrong thing,
and before you realize it,
it’s too late. If you’re one
of the chosen few people
on earth that’s lucky enough
to get your hands on a steak,
bite the shit out of it.
Thank you for knowing my name.
Goodnight.
(…)
‘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
‘I’ve been itching to read Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s debut for years – and boy, does this work of staggering bathos ever deliver. Joy Is My Middle Name is so horny and hilarious that you might not notice at first the incisive political critique propelling every poem, skewering every last shred of American culture from Costco and the death penalty to diet sodas and action movie franchises. I can‘t think of a book that zips more nimbly between the quotidian and the historic, or whose paratactic zingers better capture the weirdness of our age: “My chicken sandwich was dry. I was thirteen and this was the third Al Franken book I’d read.” “My backyard is literally a lake. / I literally need a hug. I literally got a master’s degree and felt nothing.” What other book combines wart removal with Eleanor Roosevelt? Where else can you read about e-girls twerking to LBJ in hell? Who else can pack microplastics, adultery, and overalls into the same poem, and make you (literally) cry along the way? No one, that’s who. Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the real freaking deal.’
—Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.
