Joan of Arkansas

Milo Wippermann

PERFORMANCE, POETRY, QUEER STUDIES  |  $20 $18

June 2023
Read an excerpt

ANGEL 1
Joan, I’ve been meaning to tell you
that for the next step in all this
you’ll need better lighting

ANGEL 2
And baby, maybe
do something with your hair

[Joan lifts a lock—]

ANGEL 3
What have we been telling you, Joan,
about all this business with the phone?

JOAN [aggrieved]
Optics, optics, optics

ANGEL 1
“Therefore we have Joan, who is photogenic
and will die for our emission sins”

ANGEL 3
We need the people to understand
Their always imminent closeness

ANGEL 1
In the spirit of apocalyptic times,
God is working with a logic of immediacy

ANGEL 2
The pixels of Their image must
illuminate the photons out in the world!

ANGEL 3
Your low-res self, Joan,
allows room for concept

ANGEL 2
Picture yourself
a painted icon

ANGEL 1
Use your words and your image! Anchor this present
which flees with the speed of a click!

ANGEL 2
And now…

JOAN
Don’t go!

ANGEL 3
Sorry it’s
God—Oh, no

ANGEL 1
Oh Joan, baby, it’s
gonna get wet—

ANGEL 2
Be careful, dear—
the river—we’re
sorry, Joan, it’s God—

ANGEL 3
They call!

Funny and conversational, vatic and ferocious

Daniel Poppick

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama

~~purchase the O! broadside, designed and printed letterpress by Milo Wippermann, here~~

About the Author

Milo Wippermann is the author of Pleasure as a Series of Objects (Patient Sounds) and Joan of Arkansas, which won a Whiting Award in poetry and Drama. Published work includes poems and prose in jubilat, Omniverse, Second Factory, No, Dear, Oversound, Temporary Art Review, and Organism for Poetic Research. They have an MFA from Brown University and live in Brooklyn, NY.

Praise

Within the technologies of gender, clothing, the theater of internet virality, and prophecy’s multitude of deceptive lexicons, a spirit holds court. Call it whatever—God, love, language—Wippermann and Joan both know that we may grieve it before we agree on its name or learn what it actually is. Joan of Arkansas, in its ingenious cycle of forms threading Jeanne d’Arc into our own present-day climate catastrophe, begins to articulate this presence that we stand to lose. Funny and conversational, vatic and ferocious, Joan chilled me to my core. [Milo] Wippermann’s voice is here for as long as we last. Listen closely.

Daniel Poppick

Often LOL funny, often scalding, often explosively flighty, and always gorgeously phrased, this text needs to be performed in every church parking lot in the nation tomorrow.

Cole Swensen

Joan of Arkansas is a mystical entwinement of theater, poetry, and fiction—think Sarah DeLappe, Joyelle McSweeney, Nathalie Sarraute. It is rare to encounter a work at once so heart-rending yet playful and rigorously crafted. Anyone who gives a damn about the future of literature and earth (and knows that these fates are entwined) must read this exquisite love letter to the end of the world.

Claire Donato


Praise for Previous Work

The lucidity of [Milo] Wippermann’s aphoristic writing brings to mind the way in which crisp light on a late summer day announces fall’s inevitability. This is decisive, light-handed, piercingly intelligent insight on all the ways in which we desire.

Mónica de la Torre on Pleasure as a Series of Objects

In the News

Links

Mia Chung, Emma Wippermann Win 2023 Whiting Awards for Drama

Excerpts from the Works of the 2023 Whiting Award Winners

The Whiting Awards Bring Together 10 Literary Up-and-Comers for Optimistic Celebration

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-02-6
Trade Paperback
120 pp, 5.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: June 01 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)