Description

W. W. Norton & Company, hardcover

Publication Date: August 5, 2025

Publisher Marketing:

Joy Is My Middle Namedocuments 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 funneled onto the page.

My Granny was only 18 when she had my father, and decided to leave
Virginia, but in a book they’d call that the Great Migration.
She was supposed to get off the train in New York City
but it scared her too much. It was too loud. So we grew up
in Connecticut instead. Sometimes history is as simple as that.
–from “John Brown’s Birthplace”