by Allisa Cherry
March 25, 2026
Joan by Jake Rose; Chicago University Press; 96 pages; $18.00.
As a young girl trapped in a rural, religious setting where marriage and childbirth were foregone conclusions, I had an early and earnest passion for the story of Joan of Arc and her apocalyptic bolt from convention. I read everything I could get my hands on, watched every film adaptation, and waited for the voice of God to crack me open and make me brave. When that didn’t happen, I made do with Emily Dickinson, 10,000 Maniacs, and—of course—La Pucelle d'Orléans. So, I was beyond thrilled to learn that the winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize, Jake Rose's Joan, would be a narrative sequence of lyric poems that imagines the biography of Joan of Arc as a framework for transformation around queer identity, gender, and desire.
Joan is divided into four sections that mirror significant eras of Joan of Arc’s historical journey. Domrémy, named for the village where she first began to hear voices, opens with a pastoral sonnet, pregnant with foreshadowing after the volta: “my squire would say later good luck is like a turned key / he would also say that fortune eats her children.” But if the first entry frames the scene for the persona poems to follow, the second squares the reader’s understanding that we’ll be contending with a poet's luminous efforts to reconcile a complex interiority with its corporeal surroundings. “I would prick my thumb & / suck the blood out just to get closer than closeness / to some feeling of being beloved in my own body.” Vaucouleurs to Orléans, locations where Joan is transformed from village girl to military leader, is restless and emergent. Reims to Compiègne maps a turning point, Joan's triumphant escort of Charles VII to his coronation followed by her capture at Compiègne, wounded and thrown from her horse. The final section, Rouen is named for the city in which Joan was sold to the English, tried, and burned. It is also where the speaker arrives at such crystalized realizations as “there is nothing left / that is no longer infinite.” To be clear, the architecture of this collection is not merely linear and expedient. It’s a critical part of Joan’s rhetoric. The narrative arc of our saint's life becomes the shape of a queer body finding its way to itself.
Joan is simply dazzling on the level of craft, particularly in its use of sound. Rose has written poetry in which musicality functions as a scaffold of secondary meaning, where sonic texture does some of the heavy lifting that mere prose could not. Here, the speaker recounts a moment of pain and unexpected rapture:
I was stuck in a verse
waiting for the chorus to replicate
my hidden strain or to finally be instructed
but nothing came then I put
my glove on and a bee stung me with
its fang of golden musk I was
turned on and brought to a
point of pain so abrupt and
infinite my sovereign
Listen to how the assonance weaves a thread through the stanza that mimics the poem's argument: pleasure and pain, the sacred and the erotic, are all sewn to each other. In many places, rhyme exceeds form to create a sense of the inevitable, as in the collection's most critical and devastating couplet: "I wanted to die to get clean / but instead I was refined." The half-rhyme is perfectly measured: close enough to feel like resolution, slanted enough to indicate that transformation is not the same as closure.
The brilliant central mechanism of Joan is that the collapse of biography and autobiography works in both directions, transmitting the education of real, lived history to the reader while using history as context for illuminating our contemporary poet’s interiority.” Joan of Arc is a perfect extended conceit for the speaker’s queer body transformed in a crucible of language, desire, and ruptured faith. But the speaker’s lived experience serves to illuminate the life of Joan as well, surfacing emotional truths historians, hobbled by data and facts, often can’t touch. Rose has created an interiority for Joan that includes ego and desire, that reminds us that she was young, both fragile and brutal, that she was a female body in the command of men, that her extreme calling was also an escape from prescriptive norms assigned to her because of her sex.
There’s an increase in slippage in the language of Joan between a historical register and contemporary idiom that reflects this double movement: "how trashy is life but / how low a thing is heaven" lets modern vernacular sidle up to medieval syntax, making the line between poet and persona difficult to locate. In another section, the speaker wakes in Joan's world in contemporary terms: "it's a bullshit day / when the alarm goes off / my priest comes in the tent." This blurring of biography and autobiography is the collection's central argument, that queer experience rhymes across the centuries.
It is in Rouen, the final section, that Joan arrives at its most searching material around reckoning and redemption. Very quickly the reader arrives at a litany of questions that might have been posed by Joan of Arc’s interrogators.
Asked if he ordered me to wear the clothing of a man
Asked on whose advice I took the clothing of a man
Asked if in this particular case in taking up male clothing I believed
I had done well
The anaphora creates a liturgical pressure, submitting the body to institutional scrutiny and ending with the question of submission but not answering it. What emerges from the crucible of this section is not eradication, but clarification. As pressure intensifies in Joan, Rose’s speaker arrives at something that resembles transcendence: "I don't / want to hide any hour / of my riot not any / hour of my survival." The redemption Rose offers is not a return to some before-time sense of peace and security. That would be impossible for Joan of Arc, for Rose’s speaker, and for the poet himself. When Rose writes "I will be / totally full / of this / new & dangerous feeling" what we have arrived at instead is the more challenging and more dear reward of the full possession of one’s own real story. Riot, survival, and all.
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This Open Queer Thing My Heart: Transcendent Poetics in Jake Rose’s Joan
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Todd Trapani from Pexels
Allisa Cherry grew up in a rural community in an irradiated desert in the southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest where she teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the US and recently received her MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and can be found in High Desert Journal, West Trade Review, The Maine Review and Rust + Moth. Work is forthcoming at The Columbia Review.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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