A event held at Bookhaus on Friday 26th September. The event starts at 19:00.
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.
Sasha Debevec-McKenny will be reading from her collection here at bookhaus. Tickets cost £7 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink and £2 off the book. Presented by bookhaus.
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.
‘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
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
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.
Sasha Debevec-McKenny will be reading from her collection here at bookhaus. Tickets cost £7 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink and £2 off the book. Presented by bookhaus.
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.
‘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
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
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