There are many Joans of Arc. Mark Twain wrote a two-part novel called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West, and white suffragettes were obsessed with her. Leonard Cohen, Tchaikovsky, and Little Mix have made music about Joan of Arc. Leslie Feinberg wrote that Joan was “the only person associated with cross-dressing in history I had grown up hearing about.” Then there’s the version of Joan for whom Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right party National Rally marches every May Day, and The Joan of Arc I learned about from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A new Joan has entered the pantheon this year: Jake Rose’s beautifully textured debut collection JOAN offers readers a new perspective on Joan and her interiority.
Divided into four sections—“Domrémy,” “Vaucouleurs to Orléans,” “Reims to Compiègne,” and “Rouen”—the collection charts the last years of the titular Joan’s life. I don’t mean to imply that these poems are narrative. Looping and reflexive, JOAN scaffolds explorations of sorrow, queerness, and self-reflection from Rose’s speaker—a shapeshifting Joan rather than the Joan. The poems are breathless and unpunctuated, roving over landscapes, as Joan receives “godliness,” is questioned by an inquisitor, observes the bloodstains on shirts, and the marks and complexities of the self.
In this review, I will use she/her pronouns for Joan, but the book’s speaker has a flexible relationship to gender. Joan moves through both masculine and feminine registers. As I read, I was more interested in Joan’s position as a political subject, an aspiring knight who wanted to fight for her king and in so doing chafed against the strict patriarchal structures of the time. Gender inflects one’s political subjecthood. I was curious about the ways Rose’s Joan approached the unstable nation of France in the fifteenth century.
“Domrémy,” the first and shortest section in the book, ends with the lines “I’m not a brat but look / at the pitiful state of France.” Those lines transported me not to fifteenth-century France but to the very online summer of 2024 when Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat.” Rose’s two lines anachronistically and humorously drew my attention to Joan’s relationship to her national identity. The lines suggest the outline of a binary conflict: brattishness versus a pitiful state. The word “brat” implies youth. Even before Charli XCX’s landmark album, the word suggested a young girl, badly behaved, and complaining about something. Rose sets up this suggestive dichotomy, while complicating the very idea of such a dichotomy. Joan rejects both brathood and the pitiful state of France. I was reminded of William Carlos Williams’s declaration that “Poetry is a rival government, always in opposition to its cruder replicas.” Poetry can make apparent the gaps and failures in the rhetoric of politics. Patty Nash’s Walden Pond (Third Hand Books, 2024) comes to mind. Nash’s collection similarly tracks the dislocation of the lyric “I” within the formation of the nation state by using different poetic strategies, such as pinching the form of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Nash’s and Rose’s poems set their speakers in opposition to the state and to vacuous political rhetoric. The line “I’m not a brat but look” sounds defensive. This Joan is aware of how French forces, church officials, and the paysan might perceive and then describe her argument. Joan’s insistence on her own identity, on making someone “look” at the “pitiful state of France” sets her apart from Marine Le Pen’s propagandist Joan. Rose offers a Joan of two minds, a funny and complex Joan.
The historical Joan of Arc was born c. 1412 in Domrémy, a town in the crosshairs of the Hundred Years’ War when England occupied northern France. Joan experienced visions from a young age; God, Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret spoke to her and compelled her to fight for the dauphin, Charles VII, at war against English forces. In 1429, Joan traveled to Vaucouleurs, the nearest French stronghold, to convince someone to bring her to the dauphin so that she might rally his French forces. Her plan eventually worked. She had a few successes that led to Charles’s coronation, followed by a few failures. She was captured in 1430 by Burgundian forces, allied with the English king. A bishop questioned her and charged her with heresy for wearing men’s clothes and speaking directly to God (upsetting the strict hierarchies of the Church). In Rouen, she was burned at the stake.
Primary sources about Joan come from the trial for heresy, and a later trial for her rehabilitation in 1456. In France she’s now a national hero, with a festival day on the second Sunday in May to celebrate her nationalism and martyrdom.
Rose’s Joan starts a poem toward the end of the book:
I don’t
care if I’m
ever on a
post stamp
I just want to see
a little more
blood run
This Joan dismisses the political emblem she will become and the symbols that reinforce the state’s idea of itself. (Joan has been on a French postage stamp at least twice: in 1929 and in 2012 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Orléans and Joan’s 600th birthday.) She’s disarmingly bloodthirsty. Then she gets distracted. The poem meanders from a “solar wind” to a memory of wild carrots. The speaker claims that “death was a / window we buried” and then ends: “on second thought / enough blood is / enough.” She isn’t a strident nationalist. This Joan keeps thinking, keeps changing her mind.
How would Rose’s shapeshifting Joan, I wondered, reconcile two of her different public personae? Leslie Feinberg’s cross-dressing Joan versus Marine Le Pen’s conservative and virginal maid of Orléans? Late in Rose’s collection, while Joan is interned in Rouen, she herself invents other Joans: one “who could survive this suffering” and “a Joan / who was guilty & / one who was innocent / they are lovers now fucking / in the cell above.” There’s a tension in Joan, her fervor for battle, her desire “to be plucked / out of gender and situation” but also her ambivalence toward her campaign, her restless gaze that keeps lingering on the pastoral, fingering the wild carrot flowers as she rides toward her next battle.
There have been so many people who have written about Joan of Arc, one might wonder why revisit her as a subject, but then we would lose the brilliant, intimate portrait Rose animates. Rose’s Joan feels personally described. She’s lingering in her own thoughts, so differently from how I think about binary ideas of war, battle, nationhood—which might be my own failure of imagination.
Marine Le Pen weaponizes Joan into a representation of white French identity, riddled with anti-immigrant sentiment, Islamophobia, and a far-right femininity at odds with the real Joan who only wore men’s clothes. Le Pen’s Joan wears a dress under her armor and sports a long, feminine ponytail. The real Joan of Arc had an ugly high-fashion bowl cut, not long tresses pulled back in immaculate hairography. To Le Pen, Joan suggests a political ideology. Shrunk down into a postage stamp, a little square that suggests the country has a history of ‘bravery,’ whatever that means. Political emblems, the Joan statues and stamps, reduce complexity. (Would her visions be described as mental illness in this century? Did she wear pants to avoid sexual assault while traveling? Did she regret killing people in battle?) Rose’s Joan refuses categorization. “the distance between me and what I want / is constantly deceiving,” Rose writes. The poems approach the slipperiness of experience and historical reanimation. Rose explores questions of solitude, loneliness, desire. At the end of the section Reims to Compiègne—the place where historically Burgundian forces dehorsed and captured Joan and her brothers—the text moves from lineated shortish lines into a block of text.
The text box of her future begins with the phrase “of a country.” As if her own country will hem her in—place her in a box, or in a blocky stamp. In the poem a few lines later, she glimpses the “plural / light.” In phrases such as “plural / light” Rose reminds the reader about the absurd—an attempt to describe something like a shift in the light or rays of sun cutting through the clouds before something terrible happens. Her “plural / light” creates texture and tension in the notion of a fixed category: “light” or “state” or “war” or “women.” In the way she moves through different registers, from text to image, short lines to boxes of prose, one Joan to two Joans, “lovers now fucking.”
“I embraced the / world’s smallness when small the world was,” Rose writes, prophesying how narrative might place Joan in a box. But the poems suggest the plurality of experience—a rash decision followed by a change of mind, the absurdity of human-made borders, the fear implicit in bravery.
I have been thinking about nationalism and bravery because I live in the United States of America and it’s 2026. The pitiful state I live in declared an illegal war in Iran, continues to pay for bombs to drop in Gaza, and deports my neighbors. I get angry and then tremendously sad. Like Joan, by the end of the page I think: “enough blood is / enough.”
Katherine Gibbel
Katherine Gibbel is a poet and the editor of the monthly letterpress poetry journal Send Me Press. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review, The Indiana Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Vermont. Her first book Little Sound will be published by the University of Chicago Phoenix Poets Series in October 2026.