Permanent VOLTA - Paperback

by Rosie Stockton (Author)

FINALIST for the 2022 California Book Awards in Poetry!

FINALIST for the 2022 Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry!

"Permanent Volta is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses."--Vogue

A debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and ask how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and struggle

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures. Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective. Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

Author Biography

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.