ABOUT THIS BOOK

A narrative sequence of lyric poems reimagining Joan of Arc as a framework for queer identity, transformation, and poetic voice.

Collapsing biography and autobiography, the poetry of Jake Rose’s debut explores queer identity, grief, and desire through the historical framework of Joan of Arc’s life. Moving through rural landscapes of the speaker’s youth, contradictions of faith, consequences of desire, and fragmentations of trauma, JOAN is structured as an excavation of the speaker’s most intimate moments, combining poetry with historical quotations, visual collage, and a sequence of film stills. Through vivid lyric moments, the poems construct a speaker and world both intimate and charged—“I have to touch my farthest feeling,” “the sapphire dusk draping its lace arias”—with clarity and vibrant intensity. Refusing resolution, these poems dwell in rupture, reinvention, and fluid forms of gender that come to life outside of inherited boundaries. This collection speaks from the margins, searching for a body the self might inhabit and asking what it means to transform through language, gender, and desire.

JOAN is the winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jake Rose is a poet, artist, and educator living in California’s Central Valley. Rose teaches at the University of California, Davis, and has published poems in West Branch, The Seventh Wave, and Adult Groceries, among other journals. Other projects include The Art of the Death, a book-length erasure poem; Spectropoetics, a GPS-based project in interspecies writing; and The Month Books, a series of handmade chapbooks exploring ritual, place, and hybrid form.

REVIEWS

“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"

“‘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

“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"

“The music of JOAN is perfect—in grasses, in waters, in sleeps—yet I can’t prove that because I wasn’t exactly there. But you can believe that Rose was there because Rose puts you in Joan of Arc and they become each other, in rhythms that breathe with authority and astonishment—the impregnable force of inner commitment, of a child’s fearlessness, of 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 and 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 debut.”

— Ariana Reines, author of "Wave of Blood"

“What Rose does exceptionally well here is ground us in both Joan’s body and mind as they alchemize through the lyric. . . . As Rose eschews the easy spectacle of the stake, JOAN takes us to a point where identity, body, time, and narrative constraints have been exhausted. At the moment of maximum confinement, containment itself collapses. Joan approaches her boundlessness of being, where institutions (church, state, gender) fail to confine her. At last, we reach the ontological shift which Joan has already moved into: myth, symbol—banner and banner-wielder alike—a multiplicity of meanings.”

— Zona Motel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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