"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
