Permanent Volta

Stockton presents ceaselessly fluxing potentials for eros, care, and language. Attentive to the mundane details that make life—and creating art from within the proletariat grind—so challenging, Stockton mercifully shares a rich and resourceful view of love’s future.

Rosie Stockton’s Permanent Volta is a heady and playful debut marked by apostrophes, commands, shrugged epiphanies, rhetorical questioning, and an earnestness that all operate in a shrouded didactic mode… In poem after poem, Stockton explores a bittersweet reckoning with repetition compulsion or rather, tries to understand what it means when we miss the feeling of the “brink” more than the person whose departure creates it.

Stockton would never proclaim that they have the blueprint we need to build this future. Rather, their work reminds us that we must learn how the systems that produce us function and how we are complicit in them. Only then can we destroy them. Stockton reminds us, too, that our resistance and pleasure both insist on welcoming change on an oceanic scale.

Rosie’s poems are a treasure chest of poetic forms, with language both proper and rowdy. They’re an Edna St. Vincent Millay of our Gender-Fluid generation.

And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we’ve all needed—even if we didn’t realize we needed them.

Stockton is a master of poetic forms and a fiercely committed queer visionary… A reader can jump into this stunning collection most anywhere, and swim in a whirling torrent of images, of sharp thought, of beauty.

I was struck by the harmonic assemblage of Stockton’s writing, the playful sheen cast by their images, and a meticulous ear for hypnotic language. We spoke over Zoom in early May, during the afterglow of a new moon, just before the release of their debut poetry collection, Permanent Volta, and discussed queer poetics as a mode of contesting subjection, methods for transmuting desire, and using miracles to abolish time.

I invite you, dear reader, to dream with Stockton on the pages of Permanent Volta, if only to “hear the things/we cannot see,” in an effort to transform all our relations, so that “together we made/this place/together/we can leave it.”

Read Rosie Stockton on “Permanent Volta, II” in Poetry Society of America!