150 x 225mm, 120 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, 2021

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.

In Permanent Volta, here are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems refuse, invert, and evade representation. Here, muses demand wages, then demand the world.

“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

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