The Brooklyn Rail

Rosie Stockton’s first book, Permanent Volta (Nightboat, 2021), broke into the pained solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic’s second year with exhilarating force, jolting readers into a world of great sex, passionate solidarity, and generous, whip-smart intellectual play. “I’m always so on time for you,” go my favorite lines from that book, “I walk around the block / with the smashed plastic sea shore flooding / past the rocks to the downtown of my heart.” Stockton wore their influences—from Petrarch to Marx—lightly but boldly, and their poetics was queer and kinky in a way that seemed to mark a new turn in contemporary American poetry, away from both the linguistic abstractions of an earlier era and the milquetoast identitarianism of the commercial mainstream. With Fuel (Nightboat, 2025), Stockton returns to the theme of love in the time of capital and finds it a crime scene, a bleak, petroleum-soaked landscape of shattered hearts and lost futures. But Stockton’s art only glows brighter in the dark. “I let what I hurt carry me,” they write, “I risk unaccountable heat / I get as breakable as possible.” To be breakable is to admit the world even at its worst, to be transformed as fully by pain as by joy. Fuel dares us to crack open.

Stockton and I met—virtually—in 2020, when they sat in on a class I was teaching at UCLA on William Blake and Amiri Baraka, and I immediately felt that we were kindred spirits. We met for breakfast at Astro Family Restaurant, a beloved diner on the east side of Los Angeles, in late April 2025. The following interview is excerpted from our conversation.

Anahid Nersessian (Rail): Where did Fuel come from?

Rosie Stockton: When I started writing this book I was obsessed with the question, “what’s the difference between love and desire?” Both in terms of what drives us interpersonally and in terms of drives toward collectivity. Desire is a relentless movement that ultimately wants satiation. But as they say: there is nothing worse than getting what you want. Desire must always find a new object to hurl toward. Love—real love—must refuse that logic of possession, of an end. Of course, these movements are inextricable. Perilously, perhaps desire fuels love, with the risk of running it into the ground.

In Fuel I try to think about what it means to demand intimacy in a world that’s so hostile to it, that’s marked by escalating political catastrophes. I live in Los Angeles and spend a lot of time in Bakersfield, California, where my best friend is from, which produces a massive amount of US oil supply and agriculture. The Central Valley is marked by an almost unimaginable level of extraction of oil from the earth. You drive up the I-5 and just feel the exhaustion of the earth, feel it screaming for help. It’s a very local manifestation of a material that organizes our global economic and political order. Fuel became a metaphor for me, or even a metonym, for these intimate questions about love. True intimacy seems to be the antithesis of extraction, and yet, I don’t know if there’s ever an outside to extraction, either personally or geopolitically. How do we love amidst the total devastation around us?

Rail: Why did you decide to explore these questions in poetry as opposed to critical or academic prose?

Stockton: I’m tempted to wax poetic about how poetry inherently has more revolutionary potential, but I am going to stop myself because of course that’s not true. So to be clear: poetry cannot save us.

Rail: Poetry cannot save us, you heard it here first!

Stockton: Poetry cannot save us. But it’s a useful form for processing contradictory logics and scales. In his 1929 essay “On Subject Matter and Form,” Bertolt Brecht argues that petroleum resists the “five-act form,” and that we need new aesthetic forms to register today’s political economic catastrophes. Poetic form, too, responds to global economic conditions, and has a particular agility with regard to moving between the scales of the hyper-personal and the abstract. I am interested in what is revealed by their proximity. I think a lot about the etymology of apocalypse, which comes from the Greek verb for “to reveal.” Poetry has a revelatory potential that comes just from putting disparate things next to each other and seeing how they create their own logic, how they reveal something about each other.

Rail: Something like Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image.

Stockton: Yes. I think poetry can help tune political consciousness to the contradictions of capital in more subtle—and personal—ways than academic writing. Poetry also doesn’t have to make claims, in the way academic prose does. A poem might just be a place where we allow ourselves to examine our own suffering under capitalism with precision, curiosity, and devotion. I do believe that really, truly sitting with our own pain shows us how to open our hearts to love, which is the only way to transform our relations with the world as we know it. So in that sense, poetry is where we can prepare ourselves to love well. And that includes being thoughtful about harm. At one point I say, “can we learn to finally be bad to each other, outside this planetary death drive?” And I really mean that. We’re still going to hurt each other even after the revolution, but how can we do it better?

Rail: People are preoccupied with what will happen with pleasure after the revolution, but what happens with pain?

Stockton: What forms will our suffering take? And how can we be better to each other despite, or with, that pain? Right now, there has to be a way for us—every person, no matter their social location—to vividly understand how unbearable the world is as it is presently ordered and understand that true alienation hurts all of us. Fred Moten says something like, you know, this shit is killing all of us, it’s just killing some of us faster.

Rail: Have you read Sarah Schulman’s new book yet, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity?

Stockton: Not yet.

Rail: I haven’t either, but I did read this interview David Velasco did with her in Bookforum, and he quotes her definition of solidarity as “the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter.” Not to be that person, but I’m reminded of what Percy Shelley says in his “A Defense of Poetry,” that “the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature,” and that what is political about art, not just poetry, is precisely that it teaches us to go out of our own nature, to witness and believe in the reality of others. What you were saying about poetry allowing us to be with our own suffering and the suffering of others, and that being a way to create new frameworks of being together, seems in line with that thought.

Stockton: Fully support putting Sarah Schulman and Percy Shelley in conversation! What you say reminds me that there was an image circulating on social media from one of the student encampments. I can't remember which one this was from, but someone had made a banner that had a quote from Aimé Césaire on it. It said, “the only thing worth beginning is the end of the world,” the expression of a decolonial demand that the world as it is right now and has been structured by the logic of domination must be ended. In Fuel, I’m very preoccupied with fantasies of the apocalypse in contemporary politics and poetics. How can we think about the fact that, in solidarity with Gaza, students are calling for the end of the world, together with the fact that, in Gaza, the world is literally ending every day for these people, these families, as the genocide is unfolding. And of course, we see this on a global scale too with climate crisis: the world—the Earth!—is also ending. There is and must be a new urgency around making life livable together even as we call for the destruction of its present forms. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s call for the end of the world in her essay “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics” is formative for me in this regard.

So, how do we end the world on our own terms, rather than let it happen to us? And what is an end? We see in Gaza this insistence on life, on survival, and we see a refusal to be ended. That’s what the Israeli genocide in Gaza is attempting, after all, to end Palestine. It’s apocalyptic in a very direct sense. But this apocalypse must—will—fail.

Rail: In your first book, Permanent Volta, the world was ending, too, but it wasn’t such a crisis as it seems to be in Fuel. This is a darker book, and there’s a number of poems addressed “Dear End.”

Stockton: Permanent Volta is about how to fall in love well, and it’s driven by the erotics of allowing yourself to be undone by someone in the service of building something. Fuel asks, how do you allow yourself to be transformed by the “end” of love? There’s this fantasy that things end, then we grieve nice and neatly, and there's a period at the end of the sentence. In my experience, there's never a period at the end of the sentence. The intimacy continues to unfold in jagged and messy and painful and gorgeous ways. And the “Dear End” letters in Fuel are trying to think about the erotics of grief, and about things spiraling out of your control, whether it’s a relationship ending or a world punctuated by catastrophe. The tone of those letters are petulant in a certain way. “Why is The End not writing me back? I’m being ghosted by The End!” But do I even want The End? It’s very Freudian: I fear the end, but I also wish for it. There’s a wish in every fear.

Rail: Each of those letters ends not with a period but a comma. They could go on.

Stockton: Who wants closure anyway?

Rail: My favorite question to ask poets is, who are the poets, living or dead, that you’re in conversation with?

Stockton: Always William Blake, always Arthur Rimbaud. I really ripped the tone of the “Dear End” poems from the love letters between Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. And I’ve been very influenced by Kristin Ross’s writing about Rimbaud, her book about the commune, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.

Rail: One of the poems in Fuel is a translation, from memory, of a Rimbaud poem.

Stockton: Yes, very bad memory. You probably couldn’t tell unless I told you that. “Loose Ends” is just ripping the vibe from Rimbaud’s “Sentences.” But I also feel in conversation with Diane di Prima. And Bernadette Mayer, who passed away when I was in the middle of writing the book. I took a Poetry Project workshop with Kay Gabriel, we basically read all of Mayer’s work. There’s an epigraph to Fuel from Mayer: “These are my shoes, but are these my lack of / Shoes? / That is, is my shoelessness mine?”

Rail: What’s your relationship to citation or allusion? Do you want your reader to recognize the writers you’re in dialogue with? Is that important to you? I’m always so alienated by critics who try to parse more hermetic poets, like J.H. Prynne, by tracking down all his references, or thinking they’re tracking down all his references, until the poem is reduced to a series of searches on Google Books. It seems to me a really bizarre way to engage with poetry.

Stockton: So basically you are asking: “What do you want? Do you want to be known or not known?”

Rail: It’s like that Donald Winnicott line about how we’re all just children playing hide-and-seek…

Rail & Stockton: [In unison] “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found!”

Stockton: That has to be in the transcript. “In unison, they quote Winnicott!” But to answer the question—I experiment a lot with how I wanted to invoke my influences in poetry. At the end of Fuel I just listed the books I was really steeped in while I was writing these poems. But of course it’s incomplete. If I wanted to footnote all the allusions in my head and in my heart that made it into the book, I would have to do that for every word. There’s no authentic speech that isn't marked by what you’re saturated in, and I do want people to know what discourses or traditions I’m working with. At the same time, the poems can also be read sensually. It’s all there without the citations. All to say, I think I really do want to be found, but it may be in different ways or in different places than I expect.

Rail: How do you know when you're done with a poem? Are you a reviser?

Stockton: I don’t think you can finish a poem in the same way I don’t think you can finish a feeling, but I can find a tolerable place to pause. I am a very neurotic self-editor, and in this book in particular, because there’s so much personal vulnerability in it, I felt the need to shave the poems so I could account for almost every move or word or turn or line break. With the more formally experimental poems, I sometimes stumble when I read them, and I think that’s a good thing: I want that stumble; I wanted the poems to be rough and off-kilter. So I worked very hard to shape them into very tight, vibrating forms.

Rail: Do you share work in progress with friends or students? For example, you teach poetry classes at the California Institution for Women, a state prison in Chino. Do you show your students your work?

Stockton: On the last day I will usually bring in a poem or two. It’s only fair—like, “Okay, you’ve all been sharing your vulnerable beautiful work, here’s something of mine.”

Rail: Can you gauge their reaction? Like, do they say “Yeah, this is the kind of poetry we thought you would write?”

Stockton: I have no idea. I wish I could split myself in two and see. I guess I would hope there’s something about my presence that indicates what my work would be like, but I’m probably a much nicer person—more of a people-pleaser—in real life than I am on the page. The nastier the poetry the nicer the poet.

Rail: I hear the voice in both your books as quite warm and sweet, but articulating itself under conditions of great strain.

Stockton: Well, I do think that we sometimes have to go more and more into experiences of unsafety—to risk something, to be out of control—in order to discover what we really want from our love and from our politics. This can happen on the level of tone. I don’t want to sound too pro-suffering, but we’re so obsessed with safety, and we may have to begin to consent to withstand new, difficult ideas of what it means to be okay. It may have something to do with disaggregating suffering from discomfort. The world is unlivable, but we must find each other; that’s not going to be easy, or comfortable. I play with tone in my poems to push myself to speak in ways that may go against the grain of comfortable relationality.

Rail: These questions of tone are so interesting to me. I wrote this essay, “Notes on Tone” for New Left Review about flatness in the work of three American poets—Wendy Trevino, Juliana Spahr, and Tongo Eisen-Martin—who are, I’d say, about a generation ahead of your generation of poets, who seem to me much less interested in flatness and much more interested in—

Stockton: Irreverence.

Rail: Yeah, that’s a great word for it.

Stockton: I’m just riffing, but I would guess it has something to do with how poetry now is a lot more openly libidinal than a lot of the poetry that came out of the Occupy era—it seems really to believe that we can use our libidinal drives for each other to intervene in our poetics, our politics, our metaphysics.

Rail: Maybe what you're calling irreverence also signifies an affinity for leaderless movements. In your work and in the work of many of your peers, I see a desire to make the poem a communal space and to do that affectively or, as you’re saying, libidinally, by writing, for example, about sex in very explicit terms that force a kind of intimacy on the reader and draw the reader into conviviality with the poet.

Stockton: There’s something about the first person there too. Around 2010, the first person was something the political poem wanted to neutralize, but now something different is happening: a neutralizing of the first person by over-performing it. Contemporary poetry has so much bravado and camp in it.

Rail: It’s as though we all realized that maybe the subject wasn’t so bad after all, or that the subject wasn’t the problem, no matter what L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry told us. Like, maybe fossil fuels were the problem, not the lyric “I.”

Stockton: I'm in a writing group right now with some dear friends and I was saying to them, “You know, I’ve written these two books now and I feel like there’s this very specific voice that haunts both of them, and I want to free myself not from the first person, actually, but from the second person.” I want to free myself from direct address. I’m really pursuing questions about what’s at stake in the second person, to ask “How do we write with a destabilized other?”

Rail: I was just translating some poems by a French poet, Etaïnn Zwer, and thinking about the French third-person pronoun “on,” which means “one”—as in, “One often finds it to be the case,” or whatever—but which is used much more casually in French than it is in English, and is sometimes used almost interchangeably with the first-person singular. There’s a lot of potential in that “one.”

Stockton: Maybe that will be my next book: Poems to One.

Rail: Or Poems at One. That could be good, because it could also mean “poems written at one o’clock.” Like Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems!

Stockton: It always goes back to Frank.

Rail: A minute ago, in your answer to my question about the first person, you got ahead of me—I was going to ask you what you’re reading now.

Stockton: What I’m literally reading right now on repeat is this Wanda Coleman poem about her car, it’s called “I Live for My Car” and the first line is “can’t let go of it. to live is to drive.” I really relate to that.