Late in Rosie Stockton’s new, apocalyptic book of poems, their narrator remarks: “You must want entirely / or not at all.” This could easily be the thesis of Fuel, their second book of poems from Nightboat Books. In taut, opaque compositions, Stockton’s poems toil over the painful ecstasy of desire and pleasure in a world overburdened by capitalist exploitation. Empty big-box stores serve as symbols of our modern, crumbling Roman Empire. “Geologic sluts” wander the postindustrial landscape, seeking out reservoirs and oil reserves. Making something grow in such a hostile climate is nearly impossible—least of all something as fragile as love.
Stockton was born in New Mexico but now lives in Los Angeles. Their first full-length poetry collection, Permanent Volta, was released by Nightboat Books in 2021. Summoning swamps and sweat, Stockton’s work often dives into the disconnection between labor and environment, love and drudgery, time and loss. Stockton is also an academic—a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA—and has written for the contemporary analytic journal Parapraxis. Their writing uses psychoanalytic and Marxist frames to parse the troubling effect of capital on our personal lives. In their critical prose, as in their poetry, Stockton is especially interested in psychology’s complicated relationship to notions of domesticity, stability, and power.
In this new book, the contemporary and the ancient are often juxtaposed alongside each other. Homer and Ovid make cameos but the speaker is also “turbulent with Lexapro.” Stockton plucks out vicious nouns where other poets often fall into inane truisms and cheap simplicities. Their poems feature sharp lyrical quips like “never wanted to invade / anyone’s oblivion, but there / was no other place” or “all the ways / I know harm are legal.” There is no way to “unsubscribe” from the horrors of modernity. In our time of decay, how can we connect across the chasm of disconnection? Can we? As time stops and starts, Stockton ventures a few guesses, courting the edge of oblivion with a wry smile.
After each long poem, Stockton writes a letter. They start each epilogue with “Dear End…,” as if writing to a real or imagined lover. There’s a boyish charm to Stockton’s references, and a focus on gender. One poem finds the narrator boiling a packer, getting ready to prowl the night for a possible lover. In another moment, Stockton writes, “I could pout tauter than a ratchet strap.” The time it takes to prepare for a carnal encounter slows down the electric rod of passion. They reference cars and shaving, “boxy glam” and “sulk[ing] emasculating Mars,” even the “RPMs of Jello shots.” The maintenance of masculinity needs upkeep, Stockton suggests; the illusion of the petulant, suave Romeo costs an arm and a leg. Do we have the time? Desire often requires that limitations be pushed out of the way. It dies in the daily hum of life, the litany of “idyllic chores.” Falling in love is a lot easier when you don’t have to go to work the next day.
The “bumping staccato” of Stockton’s poems leads eternally to the grim realization that breakups are always metaphysical: “it’s not love that we give up. it’s being bound to days.” Stockton illustrates the pitfalls that await love in our capitalist hellscape. What do we owe one another, we “Utopian simp[s]?” We must outrun premature death and taxes, cops and climate collapse, if we have any chance of maintaining our fragile romantic bonds. We must “want entirely or not at all.” Stockton knows the role these issues play in our intimate relationships. These boundaries all too often determine the ways we chase desire. In their poetry, Stockton asks: How do we plant bonds that endure? Perhaps the brutality of the end days can open us up to more intimate encounters. “Our horizon exists only in destruction of time,” Stockton writes. As we look underneath our fingernails, we can see the ephemeral erotics left behind. There lie the power of language, the wounds of love.
Publisher: Nightboat Books Page count: 88 Price: $17.95 Key quote: “like light, you hit me / when I ask you to” Shelve next to: Italo Calvino, Lauren Cook, Bernadette Mayer, Irene Silt Unscientifically calculated reading time: A half hour spent pacing around the garden and one long ride through the Tunnel of Love
