Milo Wippermann Selected Works

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.”

Wippermann finds a stage and stands, wrenching out deception and its tools - a language that is also an art, also a façade, also a filler, also a marker, also a picture, also a joke, a law. What good is a joke without a punchline? What good is a photo without the eye? The lens? If there is labor in poetry, Wippermann shows us its sweat, breaks its magic.