Rosie Stockton
Tuesday, May 6
Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives
The Poetic Research Bureau hosts a book launch and reading celebrating the release of Rosie Stockton's latest poetry collection, Fuel, from Nightboat Books. Anahid Nersessian and Rosie will read, and then join in conversation about the book.
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The poems in Fuel (Nightboat Books, 2025) pick at the weave of oil-soaked world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives.
Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.
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In Fuel*, Rosie Stockton chisels the surface of the poems smooth; no slivers, no splinters snag the addictive glide of thought and breath toward the horror of acceptance. Stockton’s masterpiece reveals how everything is endlessly new, especially the old, old, oldest of it all. This book transfigures our acceptance of the end to an inexplicable force of love.*
-CAConrad
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Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.