Fuel

After their first poetry collection, Permanent Volta, sang of revolution and intimacy, Rosie Stockton returns with a transporting second that communes with nature, longs for connection, and massages the edges of identity.

Stockton brilliantly considers how extractivism, power, and desire play into both our intimate and extimate relations, with a penchant for lyricism and the subtle interplay of ecopoetic, affective, and psychoanalytical syntax.

Fuel excavates the industrial 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.

“An oil-slicked love letter to The End. Spilling between volte of lusty carnality, love, and the quotidian banal.”

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.

Summons velocity, plurality.

[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.