Rosie Stockton
Nightboat Books ($17.95) 

by Walter Holland

Fuel, the second collection by Rosie Stockton, presents a complex poetry of disruptive and transformative language culminating in a strange lyric beauty. Central to this book is a queer love for a “you,” be it an aspect of the speaker, a lover, the Earth, or the creational force which made our world and still drives it forward. Their poems often emerge in cascading columns, outpourings fraught with evolutionary images from natural history, but always tied to the ache of human desire and love. Stockton’s style is an adept process of collage and décollage, taking strips of writings from visionary poets who sought to explain the mysteries of our world and the perplexing nature of love and combining them into an unstable accretion of oddly colliding imagery, an admirable and unsettling bric-a-brac. Stockton offers us their own creation story for our fragmented world, and how it is fueled, why we are driven and continue living. Is it by desire, by love? They do not offer easy answers.

The notes section reveals the collection’s ambition and lineage, explaining that “This book reverbs with the words of others” mentioning Ovid’s, Metamorphoses, Bernadette Mayer’s Soule Serman, Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations and other texts including Jacques Lacan’s Desire and its Interpretation. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in 8 CE by the Roman poet, defied easy classification and alluded to “transformations” such as those from animals to humans, inanimate objects to humans, one sex to another sex, representing gender as mutable. In this sense Metamorphoses has recently been seen as a queer text, one that posits transsexuality and non-binary gender as inherent, and, that the entire world is mutable and shape-shifting, epicurean and materialistic, made of atoms ever reconfigured as Lucretius described.

A broad genre-defying poem of mythology and literature, Ovid’s poem addressed the myths of transformation, and the recurring theme of love, both personal love and love personified by the gods and nature. Stockton nods to this mythic slant in the collection’s “Pumpjack” section. There, Stockton takes us from “layers of dead sea creatures” through “mud and plankton” to “landing on air” to “shale rock” and “oil fields,” “Roman fascism” to “global big block stores.” Stockton moves through evolutionary, geologic, and human time. There are interesting flashes as well of Rimbaud’s symbolist and fin de siècle surreal imagery, illustrating the illusory world of transformations, synesthesia, and changes in perception. They speak of

          velvet corpses, polluted, unassimilable each unit
our aromas muzzled together
                  a Luddite tactic too heavy to lift
lulling tariffed cargo with uninsured joints
           murderous orators in ecstasy

As with Ovid’s transformations, often metatextual and embedded within funny and absurd grammatical and narrative constructions, Stockton creates with Fuel their own metamorphoses, perhaps drawing on their perspective of a non-binary life, a life that understands the absurd transformational shifts in gender, the upturning of those myths, and the resulting disruption to our present-day creation myths and varied beliefs on human behavior.

In fact their poems seethe with ongoing internal and external shifts, doubts, social critiques, guilt, anguish, and ceaseless revolt against itself, which Stockton alludes to in the book’s epigraph from Frank Bidart’s “Guilty of Dust”: “Whether you love what you love//or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it//what you love is your fate.”

In “Dispersal,” Stockton writes:

            I finger a bur
            I want to be nothing
            but of things

            & if I am more me
            next to you
            it’s because relation
            made me this way

like light, you hit me
when I ask you to

I let flood emboss me
I dress up straw men
just to find new ways
to love all I extravagantly
destroy

braced for fire season
all that makes us
possible, before our candle
swallows the wick
and that summer darkness drenches us
           here, I feel the story so many ways
           I have to lay down

Fuel is not within the Language school of poetry or adjacent elliptical styles of previous decades per se; rather, it responds to and moves into Stockton’s own hybrid language for the current world of streaming and the fragmented flow of news and information, where verbs are often mismatched to nouns, metaphors are always mixed, pronouns are transferred fluidly, and synesthesia holds sway. Stockton exhibits wildly inventive phrases such as “I let flood emboss me” and “summer darkness drenches us,” capturing with virtuosity the new argot of our impatient texting world, with its autofill distortions, purposeful interruptions, opposing images taken from advertising and capitalistic speech, all of it joined or turned around. But in this sonic disjoint there is the address to a “you,” a “you” which may be the speaker, a facet of the speaker, or a beloved other. This makes for rare and wonderous images, mashups of verbs and nouns and adjectives in a viscous emulsion.

Fuel is full of humor, but like in Old English there is provocative and active physical roughness:

           the verification system we annihilate
the shackled fantasy of aching feet, adrenal shame
           and lip liner in the cozy hour molding fantasy of intimacy
how oil money rots virile our pleasure leaking to the front-end strike
                  and back-end theft slipping through power. . .

Also from “Dispersal:”

we are the only people
today shrugging stunning
how the stolen Snake River
confronts stone
volcanic battery life
surges hungry snacks
litter my lining
strained for you
this is loving. I walk so
fast wanting water
eddies to ghost, wanting
to point myself out
to you, there, there
and there

Stockton’s poems move us through a world littered with units of free-floating language, from “Chevron’s unliberated future scenarios” to “eddies of ghost”; they show us how human desire and love always seek expression, always point toward the mysterious soul “there, there/ and there.” Perhaps most importantly, they show us transformation is possible and has been the basis of all creation since the dawn of time.