Review: Disappointment Is My Middle Name (A Review Of Joy Is My Middle Name By Sasha Debevec-McKenney)

By Hugh Blanton

 

When reading the Thomas Merton journals some years ago I came across an entry where Merton raved about how much he loved The Essential Lenny Bruce, a book of Lenny Bruce's stand-up routines. The very next day I went to the library to check it out and the day after that I took it right back after reading less than a dozen pages. The book was Bruce's routines verbatim. Stand-up comedy, delivered to a live audience, does not translate well to the written page. Stand-up relies on the timing of delivery, the very sound of the spoken words, and the pacing of jokes. All of that, plus the acting, the facial expressions, and the crowd energy, is lost to the reader sitting alone in their room with a book. "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" needs a very precise delivery to be taken as cynical mockery, and on the printed page it comes off as anything but (although DeLillo shoehorned it in fairly well in Underworld).

 

Sasha Debevec-McKenney's debut poetry collection, Joy is My Middle Name, opens up with "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.

 

Addressing the reader directly tells us she probably never used this live on stage (at least not verbatim), but whether on the stage or page it's a begging clunker of an opening. There's another poem in the collection, somewhat unimaginatively titled "Stand-Up Routine," that could very well be taken as a live bit with all the you know and the so and the I mean thrown about. The speaker is awed by how the pig in the movie Babe is able to herd sheep and she just can't shut up about it and it would likely get a few laughs from drunken patrons at The Improv.

 

Joy is My Middle Name was the winner of the 2026 Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize, an award given to a writer aged thirty-nine or younger—the age Dylan Thomas was when he finally succeeded in drinking himself to death. The book was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and reviewer Fiona Sampson, writing for The Guardian, said, "it fits Fitzcarraldo's modernist and experimental house style in ways that feel refreshing for UK poetry." Joy is not the least bit modernist and can hardly be called experimental. Debevec-McKenney said one of her influences is Charles Bukowski, and she clearly wears that influence on her sleeve in the prosey free verse here, even her lecherousness is reminiscent of the Laureate to the Lowlifes. She is, however, much more wrapped up in herself than Bukowski ever was (as unlikely as that is) and is enamored enough by pop culture to make Bukowski puke (Bukowski hated many aspects of American pop culture, especially Disney's Mickey Mouse and television game shows).

 

Like a lot of new poets that try to be innovative, some of her poems are gimmicky; her poem "Sestina Where Every End Word is Lyndon Johnson" (it's not actually a sestina, only having five six-line stanzas before the envoi) really does have Lyndon Johnson as an end word, even if it would have had Lyndon Johnson for an end word anyway. "write about Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson,/ die writing about Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson." Debevec-McKenney has an unusual obsession with US presidents, she mentions Johnson in other poems, remarking on him picking up a dog by the ears and how he said the dog's yelp was a yelp of joy, not pain (and then another poem about LBJ's penis). She wrote a poem after visiting the Franklin Pierce museum titled "Poem for the Racist Tour Guide at the Franklin Pierce Manse": "I pulled up to the FRANKLIN PIERCE statue hoping/ it would have been pulled down, considering,/ everything he'd done". She isn't specific about what he did, but Pierce signed the Kansas Nebraska act into law, allowing settlers to own slaves in the two territories where it had previously been banned.

 

Debevec-McKenney's poems often carom around from topic to topic, in her prose poem "Dogsitting Poem, Chicago, January 2023" out of nowhere comes this: "Sometimes you just have to get out of town. Especially if in your town, in Wisconsin, at that very moment, a local Native American activist was being outed as a white woman born Katie." She then bounces back to the dogsitting and there is no further mention of this Katie. She was referring to Kay LeClaire, a Madison, Wisconsin artist/activist. Under the Ojibwe name nibiiwakamigkwe, she was given a residency at UW Madison as its first "community leader in residence." One of her notable accomplishments was to get the white-owned music venue Winnebago to change its name to The Burr Oak. After it was discovered nibiiwakamigkwe was a white woman with no Native American ancestry, she resigned her residency. In a statement to the university newspaper she said she would return all culturally related items in her possession to the community, but she made no mention of what she would do with the five-thousand dollar stipend she had received. "Community leader" is good work if you can get it. Debevec-McKenney closed out the stanza with "I physically couldn't . . . think about the capacity white women have to do evil."

 

Irenosen Okojie, the judge chair for the Dylan Thomas prize, said the book is "an exuberant, blistering collection full of life, humour and ideas. Debevec-McKenney is a ferociously gifted talent. The book is remarkable in the way it galvanizes the reader with a sense of intimacy that is authentic and a voice that felt like an antidote to our tricky times." The book does have humor, something sorely missing in poetry, but like most of the books rolling off the presses today it relies on the tropes of race, sexual identity, and gender. (We're spared climate change and there is only one vague mentioning of Donald Trump.) The acknowledgments/notes at the end of the book go on for fourteen pages and is more poetic than the poems that preceded them. She also takes the opportunity in the acknowledgments/notes to ask Taylor Swift if she'd like to collaborate on a song together. The inevitable Taylor/Travis divorce coming up would no doubt fit in well in a Debevec-McKenney collection.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.