JOAN, winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize
“Magnificent. A Landmark début.” -Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book
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”