“I spent all my loneliness with you here,” the speaker of Jake Rose’s JOAN opens, drawing us into a thrilling homage to Joan of Arc: one as sorrowful as it is vulnerable, wry in its tired understanding, poignant in the universality of its found forms—and at a remove from the buildup of immediacy and intimate relation, self-disclosure invoking a lingering memory of wanting to “get closer than closeness / to some feeling of being beloved in my own body.”
The winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize from The University of Chicago Press, Rose’s astounding debut volume of poetry rhapsodizes on a paradoxically controlled beat, inhabiting the linguistic space between the “melodic language of dreams” and “the nudity of waking speech,” while spilling over into queer relationality and vivid sensory rapture, using the poetic object as a mode of play through which to reckon with the literary influence that structures the poems. Rose, who has composed verse on chronic illness, experimented with an Internet poetics, and co-created poems with birds, finds in JOAN’s pages a place to allegorize the French Catholic saint, embodying her figure to cross that distance, imagining himself into her historical narrative with fervor and heightened insight.
The thematic approach of weaving a recognizable, legendary—and tragic—heroine with his own personal history is one rife with meaning: Joan is his invention, becomes his through an image that comes intentionally fragmented, as the speaker admits: “I am inventing a Joan now / who could survive this suffering / I also invented a Joan / who was guilty & / one who was innocent.” The doubling of a complicated woman, her dual nature less portrayed as duplicitous as in multiples—complex, irresolvable—arrives repurposed, her physical body reconfigured into a vector through which Rose’s speaker comes to understand himself, the lyric “I.” His “thirst is not like hunger it is much / worse and I have been thirsty / for so long from translating / myself into the perceptions of others”—and how better than to conceal one, seen only in partial view, through a medium that allows one to elude complete legibility for a while, to be brazenly exposed and yet cling to the allure of the mysterious, the hiding places of the opaque?
Where is the speaker to wear his disguises, when his identity reveals itself through “this open queer thing my heart / like a tar dipped pearl”?
“I would hide / like a child in summer,” Rose writes, stylistic simplicity creating room for emotional registers unobscured by more complicated syntax, their felt sense of intimacy shaped without excess busyness: “breathe in my vowels and we / enter each other / like breaking waves.” And yet, other poems in which the classic subject of childhood is a subject of inquiry are redolent with what becomes a powerful, expressive darkness (“there is no more sitting in / the mongrel shade of my youth.”), the harrowing images undeniably tracing the passage of time.
The development of his speaker’s voice reveals a heightened regard for constraint, and obsessions over moral and spiritual convictions about limitation—all the while invoking with a mournful solemnity the female martyr’s self-abnegation, purposing her myth and artistic lineage as a wellspring of inspiration: “I hang splendor on my / torn sleeve so god will see its edges and notice me raw as a seam.”
Through its inviting provocations, JOAN exudes a canny awareness of a greater social sphere, and considers how the uprooted speaker, like the mythologically strong Joan of Arc, fits into it: “I will continue to break this place / until its shape can fit less abrasively against mine.” Rose pays attention to the shaping of personhood, persona—how we feel we can actively choose our presentation’s meaning, such as in the case of JOAN’s direct influence on a discernible (and, as Srikanth Reddy cheekily postulates, likely autobiographical) personal history, while at other times our past selves become distant, veering toward incomprehensible, “as I fell into its open terms / a loosening sensation began to form / after all the meaning / had run out & abandonment rushed in.”
An internal, as well as external, movement takes place through a waterfall of linguistic play and carefully demarcated sections of quotation from Joan of Arc’s tale, as JOAN integrates the speaker’s discoveries, revealing new understandings of how exclusion and belonging are, when viewed in the context of a familiar national script, no more than mirror equivalences, an interior odyssey that uses imagery of the world without—its distances, its beguiling spatial mastery—to make sense of that grief-ridden thing, the soul.
In the section Reims to Compiègne, July 1429-May 1430, Rose writes:
I said let’s pray until we turn ourselves into geese migrating & wake up a thousand miles away I need to immigrate the very marrow of my soul the soft red foam the innards of the doe & its protein rich bones
The nuances of language strip away the fat around a circuitous investigation of pain, until for the speaker, who is caught on the troubling contradictions of self-sacrifice and where to find love in a landscape bound by indeterminacy, “there is just the endurance of passing through / each anticlimax and trying not to trust other / people’s imitation over your real pain.”
A standalone tour de force as well as a brilliant invocation of martyr as muse, JOAN comprises both the welter of literary innovation and its seemingly converse image, historical tradition, showing us that in the eyes of surrender, “forfeit is a simple / envelope to slide into but hard to burn away.” JOAN’s sonic resonances and elevated emotions impart a refined sensibility, one whose bird calls remain piercing—one able to, with all courage, withstand the test of time.
