FINALIST for the 2022 California Book Awards in Poetry!

FINALIST for the 2022 Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry!

"Permanent Volta is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses."-Vogue

A debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and ask how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and struggle

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures. Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective. Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

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About the Author
Rosie Stockton is a poet based in Los Angeles. Their first book, Permanent Volta, is the recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize, and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021. Their poems have been published by Publication Studio, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, and WONDER. They are currently a Ph.D. Student in Gender Studies at UCLA.

Reviews

"Permanent Volta is 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."-Vogue

"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."-BOMB

"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."-Starred Review in The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books

"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."-LARB

"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."-The Believer

"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.'"-Full Stop

"And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we've all needed-even if we didn't realize we needed them."-Lambda Literary

"A paean to the disruptive power of queer desire, Rosie Stockton's rhapsodic debut, Permanent Volta, embodies a poetics of the swerve, of switch life beyond butch and femme, where we inhabit, kaleidoscopically, the pleasure-pains of Eros's excesses. We are hailed, are beckoned by, Stockton's visionary imperatives: "it's time / for love / in the time / of dollar store cutlery." We torque to find a way to love under late-capitalism, awash in the luxurious bliss of Permanent Volta, with Stockton as our humble guide."-Jackie Wang

"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

"A fresh take on contemporary subjectivity and gender ("deep in my reliquary it rots like gender"), Permanent Volta is necessary reading for those of us who aim to re-invent the future."-Dawn Lundy Martin

"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

Book Information
ISBN 9781643620756
Author Rosie Stockton
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Nightboat Books
Publisher Nightboat Books