Rosie Stockton: Permanent Volta (Poetry)

Permanent Volta is a debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and asks how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and struggle.

In Permanent Volta are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.
Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems refuse, invert, and evade representation. Here, muses demand wages, then demand the world.

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.

Review: “Stockton, who is from New Mexico, is releasing their debut book, Permanent Volta, about gender, sexuality, and love this week. It 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.”

ROSIE STOCKTON: The contradiction posed in the title is one of the main questions I was writing through in this book. As you say, if the turn is “permanent,” it exists in motion, in a constant state of becoming. I was interested in constant becoming in relation to form. Usually sonnets only have one volta, followed by some semblance of resolution in the couplet. How could a “permanent volta” refuse this resolution? I might even distill this poetic question into a familiar political question around reform or revolution: what does change look like within a given structure vs. what does it look like to change that structure? Like so many poets since the 13th century, I took the sonnet as the structure I wanted to sabotage, slow down, hustle, edge, and flood as a way to ask this question.

Poetry
Permanent Volta
Rosie Stockton
ISBN: 9781643620756
Paperback
120 pages
Published: May 18, 2021
Publisher Nightboat Books
$16.95

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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