I have long been fascinated by the combustion engine. Because there’s something terrible about what’s happening inside that big steel encasement. Hiding among the syllables of “automobile.” According to AI, I shouldn’t be thinking of the combustion in an engine as explosions. “Combustion” is disciplined and orderly. It’s not “detonation,” like what happens with a bomb. And yet it’s hard not to fear the engineering that, in principle, seems to literally be “playing with fire.” The gasoline-air mixture interacts with flame in a contained environment, the AI tells me. It’s guided in a certain direction.
Perhaps this tension between volatility and direction could be seen as the primary anchor for Rosie Stockton’s Fuel. Especially as those ideas might relate to the actions taken on either side of a romantic relationship. Where “relationship” could be defined as the containment that keeps two people thinking of their lives in relation to one another. Not that that would necessarily be emotionally stable. Just consistent. Like something that would “never end.” Because most of the book seeks out situations that test how far the poet and “you” can go to pull apart the relationship. Knowing the relationship wasn’t going to pull apart. And when you snapped back together there would be an intensity, a high consequence reunion. In many ways, the relationship at the center of Fuel feels like make-up sex over and over. Like being with someone you have sexual chemistry with, but who they are in your mind can’t quite match their sexual pull. Maybe it’s worth it, you think, after all the fights, the antagonisms, the little poisons that get sown into your daily interactions, because those explosive make-up sex sessions are that good.
But I might be reading the relationship dynamic all wrong. Stockton’s poems are both involved within this heated, possibly toxic, romance, and they’re detached, observing what might be the truth of the situation. Each section has a “Poem of Ending,” whose commentary reflects on what the poet should be taking away from what they just wrote. Should this level of metapoetics, observing what the self has to say about writing so intensely about the self, be involved in the dynamics of a relationship? Should the relationship be read as a vehicle for thinking through the poet’s conflicted political existence? It’s possible to read the book as a sustained criticism of capitalist consumption, with the admission that the poet is also reliant upon the capitalist system for access to their basic needs. In this case, the “you” appearing in the majority of the book, would speak to the consuming and claustrophobic relationship anyone has with capitalism. A section speaking to the poet’s co-dependent anxieties (where are “you”? Are “you” thinking of me?) would comment on capitalism’s isolation of people. Under the banner of individualism. Another section where the poet plays through the thrills of being an object of desire could speak to capitalism’s impersonal rewards system encouraging people to exploit themselves for gain. I’m inclined to this reading mainly because of the book’s concluding poem, “Pumpjack.” Whose imagery pulls liberally from a vast ecosystem the poet relates to themselves through metaphor. The poem also features an extraction system engineered by “Adam.” And I’m unsure whether to read this as a critique on patriarchal power structures or, in context of the toxic relationship reading, an extended consideration of fuel. In particular, the fuel driving the poet’s desire, and what had sustained the relationship in most of the book.
In light of Stockton’s previous book, Permanent Volta, I’m more inclined to read Fuel via the toxic relationship lens. Both books source their energy from of an intense romantic desire for “you.” The main contrast between the two involves the poet’s personal stance on relationship. There is a heat to Permanent Volta that radiates out (like the poetic heat occurring at the volta, a poem’s turn). Fuel, on the other hand, operates with a hothouse heat. Imagine a “romance” conducted inside a greenhouse. Theoretically, all that natural aroma and greenery would speak to the Romantic in any of us. But maybe that heated inside would be the misinterpretation of passion. Is it hot in here, or am I hot for you? Is our entwined fate keeping us attached to one another? Or is there a love and companionship that serves as a fuel.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.