Permanent Volta

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. Lines such as “Oh how / I would love you angelic slut” or “i’d like to extend an invitation to you / to my fantasy” or “I demand you / demand me” exemplify a direct summoning of the beloved. “I miss you the most the moment before we / part / all desire mimics that brink,” says the speaker of “Material Memory.” 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.

The question of what can occur at the edge of self-sovereignty has been explored by theorists and writers such as Lauren Berlant and Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stockton is in conversation with these philosophical-poetic genealogies. Yet even in the shadowy pre-mirror-stage of “paranoid fragments,” the poet has a sense of humor about theorizing desire and mimesis, always connecting it to how desire is formed under capitalism. For example, in the poem, “Eunuch of Industry,” the speaker wonders about kissing in an Amazon locker or how they might make a good sacrifice, neatly packaged in a Blue Apron box.

The chatty cerebral energy of the book might distract from the enchanting animacy of seasons or the watchful celestial figures (“the geese ghosted winter,” “night sun / with a gut,” “shake my rotten moonbeams”), but I admire the way the poet doesn’t concentrate all of the oxygen of the poems on enrapturing imagery (which they do deftly) and instead, takes space to deliver sharp insight. A permanent volta is difficult to sustain; imagine a continuous “turning” instead of a peak and release of tension. But part of the book’s queer politics asks us what we also release when we rid ourselves of tension: accountability, an objectified beloved, some compulsion to conquer and abandon. Instead, the poet offers simultaneous invitation and exit. They write: “together we made / this place” and then, “together / we can leave it.”