“Magnificent. A Landmark début.”
— Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book
JOAN, winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize from The University of Chicago, is a narrative sequence of lyric poems reimagining Joan of Arc as a framework for queer identity, transformation, and poetic voice.
What Others Are Saying
“JOAN is a book about Joan of Arc in the same way that Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is about the color red. That is to say, JOAN is mostly about someone named Jake Rose, though it’s spoken by Joan of Arc in language of intense emotional luminosity, sorrow, and wisdom. Following Joan’s journeys, the book’s dramatic monologues bring us into harrowing and exhilarating proximity with a queer interiority that registers the beauties and terrors of the world with astonishing precision and acceptance. In this beautiful and haunting book, Rose’s similes have a political resonance that expand the field of likeness available to us as readers in a world riven by difference.”
— Srikanth Reddy, Phoenix Poets series editor and author of Underworld Lit
“‘I want to be inside each material,’ writes Rose, telling the story of what it is to inhabit an outline both solid and void, only to shed it when the time comes. Emanating its own light and reality—magnets inside the faces of horses, the ‘vermillion glued to my eyelids’—a ‘new alphabet’ forms. None of this will stop the book from breaking, snapping off, a destiny beyond narration. JOAN is a practice enacted in the face of incommensurable loss that’s also ‘aflame’ with ‘silver’ glinting from the ‘darkest clutch.’”
— Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash A Heart
I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH!!! I always long for this kind of poetry that Rose writes, poems that sweep me into a fully realized new frame and understanding of the world we barely get to live in. How exciting to have a new lens for our temporary eyes, hearts, lungs and livers! These poems rock the temple anew!”
— CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
“The music of JOAN is perfect—in grasses, in waters, in sleeps—yet I can’t prove it, because I wasn’t exactly there. But you can believe Jake Rose was there, because Rose puts you in her, and they become each other, in rhythms that breathe with authority, astonishment—the impregnable force of inner commitment, of a child’s fearlessness, a child’s godliness. I couldn’t put this book down. JOAN’s cousins, I think, are the ultraviolent yet ultra-mystical epics of Frank Stanford and Pierre Guyotat; the later Alice Notley. Each line I read reminds me that the lyric mode was invented by a soldier, and that this world has yet to raise itself to the level of its girl saints. Magnificent. A joy to read. A landmark début.”
— Ariana Reines, author of Wave of Blood