heartland of the Central Valley, a place where pump jacks and blossoming almond trees exist in tandem. The collection, in which Stockton holds up personal heartbreak as a mirror to the tragedy of environmental decay, exemplifies the disparate elements that poetry can meld: land rights, oil fields, sex, biblical apocalypse, and climate disaster."
-Juliette Jeffers,
Interview"In taut, opaque compositions, Stockton's poems toil over the painful ecstasy of desire and pleasure in a world overburdened by capitalist exploitation... What do we owe one another, we 'Utopian simp[s]?'"
-Grace Byron,
The Believer"Los Angeles poet Stockton showcases capitalism's quiet shaping of our day-to-day lives in this collection. Exploring themes of labor, desire, gender, and loss, Stockton's poems trace the emotions and structures that define us. With sharp attention to the everyday-mentions of gas-station gifts, Venmo requests, love letters-Stockton crafts a collection that is as politically urgent as it is deeply personal."
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Alta Journal"In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends-whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons."-Benjamin Krusling
"In
Fuel, Rosie Stockton chisels the surface of the poems smooth; no slivers, no splinters snag the addictive glide of thought and breath toward the horror of acceptance. Stockton's masterpiece reveals how everything is endlessly new, especially the old, old, oldest of it all. This book transfigures our acceptance of the end to an inexplicable force of love. "
-CA Conrad
"
Fuel is a book about how underneath the petty vengeances and idle whimsies that Ovid tracked as metamorphoses, even deeper kinds of transformation lurk. The apocalypse is so upon us that it may have already happened, and where are we now? The visionary poems of Fuel can't quite say-who could?-but they glimpse a giddy freedom."
-Chris Nealon
"An oil-slicked love letter to The End. Spilling between volte of lusty carnality, love, and the quotidian banal."
-Keegan Brady,
The Whitney Review"[A] bewildering yet tender journey through a world unraveling on both a personal and ecological level . . . Stockton is striking a balance between a scholarly engagement with critical theory and emotional immediacy."
-Allisa Cherry,
West Trade Review"Each verse blushes with intelligence and mischievous, voluptuous insight. In them, I hear an outright refusal of what is often imagined as our bleak and weak passivity in the face of climate catastrophe. . . Rosie Stockton's poems are love letters to the end and, in this sense, are a revelation."
-Divya Victor
"Summons velocity, plurality."
-Karla J. Strand,
Ms. MagazinePraise for
Permanent Volta"A lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care."
-Alexis Okeowo,
Vogue"These poems rise, softly recede and then spill forth-like a body of water, like a 'spilt glass of wine', like desire itself. In this collection, an addicting world of eroticism and fantasy is carefully constructed, while the speaker remains firmly rooted in the reality of materiality, grasping with its bleakness, while finding escape and beauty wherever is possible. Inherently radical, these delicate poems will shatter you in the most pleasurable way."
-Rachel Rabbit White
"Brainy, bratty, witty, libidinal, vulnerable, this book is a 'bad sub,' a queer comrade you can trust to show up on the front lines of resistance."
-Brian Teare
