Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Jake Rose to discuss their debut collection, JOAN. Jake is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal.
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Jake Rose is the author of JOAN, winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poets Book Prize, published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2026. A poet, artist, and educator living in California’s Central Valley, Rose teaches at the University of California, Davis, and has work published in West Branch, The Atlantic, The Academy of American Poets, Foglifter, Coach House Books, and elsewhere. Other literary works include The Art of the Death, a book-length erasure poem; Spectropoetics, a location-based series of interspecies writing; and The Month Books, a collection of handmade chapbooks exploring chronic illness and hybrid form.
About JOAN
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.
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