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Permanent Volta
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 one who shares the same room.
120 pages, Paperback
First published May 18, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 17, 2022
Queer! theory! excellence!
A LIBIDINAL NOBODY
I thought you’d come for me, for me in the bar. Your light I thought would come for me, would inhabit my hungry nobody, where we’d be object together, we’d rot under the leaves, compost and subjectivity.
In the leaves I thought you’d come with money and gender, you’d pull over deep inside my light. Hungry as I am, you would rot with me, we’d make money. There we would be all nobody and together, object and object.
In the bar I was hungry for your rot, your leaves and objects, your moneyed gender. I thought you could be inside of me, deep in my inhabit. But the hungry rot disrupts, it disrupts the objects of our nobody.
At the bar I thought you’d leave me, gender alone. I’d compost my hungry subjectivity, empty as a nobody, all alone, thought and money. The thought it rots inside of me, deep in my nobody it rots like gender. The light is hunger and object, it can’t have thought to leave.
But light left me to rot there, there at the bar, with no gender and no money, the bar where I thought you’d come, all object and hungry nobody.
A LIBIDINAL NOBODY
I thought you’d come for me, for me in the bar. Your light I thought would come for me, would inhabit my hungry nobody, where we’d be object together, we’d rot under the leaves, compost and subjectivity.
In the leaves I thought you’d come with money and gender, you’d pull over deep inside my light. Hungry as I am, you would rot with me, we’d make money. There we would be all nobody and together, object and object.
In the bar I was hungry for your rot, your leaves and objects, your moneyed gender. I thought you could be inside of me, deep in my inhabit. But the hungry rot disrupts, it disrupts the objects of our nobody.
At the bar I thought you’d leave me, gender alone. I’d compost my hungry subjectivity, empty as a nobody, all alone, thought and money. The thought it rots inside of me, deep in my nobody it rots like gender. The light is hunger and object, it can’t have thought to leave.
But light left me to rot there, there at the bar, with no gender and no money, the bar where I thought you’d come, all object and hungry nobody.
June 8, 2022
I think I’d like someone smarter than me to read this and tell me about it. For me, it was like reading something in a language I only know a little bit of, where I catch snatches of meaning and inflection here and there but can’t grasp even the gist of the whole. I don’t take the opacity I experience as a problem with the work, though. Rather, it seems to me that the problem is me.
Here’s what I get from my reading of these poems: the language is turned in ways that defy my ability to understand it, and I can’t help wondering if that is perhaps the point, or at least part of it. There is a definite anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, very queer foundation to these poems, so perhaps a chaotic use of language (it seems chaotic to me, anyway) is a way of enacting a form of radical revolution.
Many of the poems are also highly erotic, but in ways that are hard for me to parse. The poems queer gender and engage with kink in ways that are outside my experience—which, again, seems to me to be the place from which they derive their power. It’s not a negation of or resistance to the existing power structures, but rather an engagement with power that’s entirely outside the establishment’s ability to imagine. Or so it seems to me. And that makes the poems exciting and—to me—a little intimidating, perhaps. All of which is to say, I think the poems are doing what they’re intended to do. And I think it’s on me to catch up to them.
Here’s what I get from my reading of these poems: the language is turned in ways that defy my ability to understand it, and I can’t help wondering if that is perhaps the point, or at least part of it. There is a definite anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, very queer foundation to these poems, so perhaps a chaotic use of language (it seems chaotic to me, anyway) is a way of enacting a form of radical revolution.
Many of the poems are also highly erotic, but in ways that are hard for me to parse. The poems queer gender and engage with kink in ways that are outside my experience—which, again, seems to me to be the place from which they derive their power. It’s not a negation of or resistance to the existing power structures, but rather an engagement with power that’s entirely outside the establishment’s ability to imagine. Or so it seems to me. And that makes the poems exciting and—to me—a little intimidating, perhaps. All of which is to say, I think the poems are doing what they’re intended to do. And I think it’s on me to catch up to them.
October 4, 2021
Really cool collection dealing with queerness, capital, modernity, and filled with uncommon words.
The book feels very futuristic, as it delves into our current world of data and social media and the internet in general.
A couple poems at the end left me hollow, but everything preceding that has me fired up.
I read it twice, and also read a bunch of stuff about the author online. I love reading interviews following reading the book.
The book feels very futuristic, as it delves into our current world of data and social media and the internet in general.
A couple poems at the end left me hollow, but everything preceding that has me fired up.
I read it twice, and also read a bunch of stuff about the author online. I love reading interviews following reading the book.
June 8, 2021
excellent new poetry. “where news scrolls through our hands like water” & “the sweet mud of my boots” & tons of other lines and poems that struck
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August 15, 2024Unbelievable imagery and ephemeral depictions of modern life. Rosie's tapped in
December 27, 2024
most appreciated the places where stockton interweaves questions of poetic form with the forms capitalism relies upon and reproduces ("like the volta helps / narrative articulate faulty justice"), and the points where, against closure, they imagine a world where we might "hear the things
we cannot see" — a world where we might be in a constant condition of "turning" (think of Sara Ahmed, the history of apostrophe, etc.) placed at the “edges of my knowing” by this sonic uncertainty. interesting to consider the frequency with which audiovisual gaps are used to represent a kind of resistance to closure in poetry. while i also appreciate stockton's experiments in language, i wished for more places where the sheer density of language loosens up. "sonogram of an earthquake" struck me as a place where stockton most effectively enfolds their erudition and commitment to anti-capitalist, queer thought within language that enacts the texture and spectral forms of sound that drift across the poem. i truly felt myself seeping through form, through knowing. needed more room, i felt, for stockton's stunning turns of phrases to emerge. but then again, i realize that the heart of stockton's project is “to resist speaking. Or anything that might be understood as spoken," a resistance to pure legibility/audibility which the collection truly embodies.
we cannot see" — a world where we might be in a constant condition of "turning" (think of Sara Ahmed, the history of apostrophe, etc.) placed at the “edges of my knowing” by this sonic uncertainty. interesting to consider the frequency with which audiovisual gaps are used to represent a kind of resistance to closure in poetry. while i also appreciate stockton's experiments in language, i wished for more places where the sheer density of language loosens up. "sonogram of an earthquake" struck me as a place where stockton most effectively enfolds their erudition and commitment to anti-capitalist, queer thought within language that enacts the texture and spectral forms of sound that drift across the poem. i truly felt myself seeping through form, through knowing. needed more room, i felt, for stockton's stunning turns of phrases to emerge. but then again, i realize that the heart of stockton's project is “to resist speaking. Or anything that might be understood as spoken," a resistance to pure legibility/audibility which the collection truly embodies.
July 20, 2025
"Asking, what can be thrown like a clog into a machine, once the machine learns to swallow the clog, energized. Updated strategies: a spilt glass of wine on the logic board. Spreading and spreading. From a crevice of a body. A moon rages, representing nothing."
March 13, 2022
i quite enjoyed every poem in the section “haigiography” where the collection shone in its exploration of eros + capitalism. other sections felt more disjointed and difficult.
July 31, 2022
this is the best book of poetry i have read this year
April 11, 2023
so unbelievably good
June 11, 2025
"But light left me to rot there, there at the bar, with no gender and no money, the bar where I thought you'd come, all object and hungry nobody."
January 12, 2026
clicked and unclicked for me, as a whole, three or four time. very undecided on final feelings
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews