Fuel

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.

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.

Fuel recasts us in a para-apocalyptic, queer Eden, whose occupants wander, riding the tectonic heave as we are fracked and flooded, set on fire, and gaslit about the off gassing. 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. The book is a seductive, irresistible invitation to attach ourselves more fiercely, more tenderly to this apocalypse so we can hold this planet even closer, as we would our final lover. Rosie Stockton’s poems are love letters to the end and, in this sense, are a revelation.