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.
PRAISE
In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends—whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons. -Benjamin Krusling
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
Fuel is a book about how underneath the petty vengeances and idle whimsies that Ovid tracked as metamorphoses, even deeper kinds of transformation lurk. The apocalypse is so upon us that it may have already happened, and where are we now? The visionary poems of Fuel can’t quite say—who could?—but they glimpse a giddy freedom. -Chris Nealon
Fuel recasts us in a para-apocalyptic, queer Eden, whose occupants wander, riding the tectonic heave as we are fracked and flooded, set on fire, and gaslit about the off gassing. Each verse blushes with intelligence and mischievous, voluptuous insight. In them, I hear an outright refusal of what is often imagined as our bleak and weak passivity in the face of climate catastrophe. The book is a seductive, irresistible invitation to attach ourselves more fiercely, more tenderly to this apocalypse so we can hold this planet even closer, as we would our final lover. Rosie Stockton’s poems are love letters to the end and, in this sense, are a revelation. -Divya Victor