Rosie Stockton’s Fuel, (Nightboat, 2025) begins with an epigraph from Bernadette Mayer’s “Soule Sermon”:

Mayer’s Aristotelian line of questioning here of how we possess and are possessed by what we lack animates Stockton’s lyric theorization in Fuel of heartbreak at the end of the world. Or the end of the world at the beginning of heartbreak. That is, Fuel is a book about scale and desire. Stockton’s poetics are guided by a Lacanian understanding of desire’s incommensurability with satiation—desire as a receding horizon. The horizon in question here, though, isn’t the abstract lines of Lacan’s notoriously convoluted diagrams; it’s the horizon of California’s central Valley, pumpjacks pulling oil from shale, almond trees dropping their blossoms. Love’s ending, in Stockton’s poems, is not like the oil fields, not like finance capital, not like the end entailed by climate crisis—or rather it is, but the metaphor runs both directions at once. Thus our arrival at a terminus is troubled. A vehicle can’t travel both ways on a highway at once.

We can never really arrive at the place called the “end.” Which isn’t to say we aren’t guided by an image of our arrival there—or that we can’t thus labor to love the end. Between Fuel’s named sections are pleading love letters to this ungraspable other: “Dear End,” begins each. There’s a certain slyness here in substituting the name of the “end” for the name of the lost lover—attachment finding another name for its object and thus maintaining its momentum. This is Stockton’s slyness for sure, evidenced in the cleverness of their sense-doubling enjambments, but this is also just the slyness of desire, which wants to keep running. We’ve been there too. “It’s not that I chase you, it’s that you cause me to chase,” Stockton writes to the End. The aim of the chase isn’t to reach that fleeting form we pursue but is the pursuit itself. That is simple enough so long as our favored form keeps running a few steps ahead of us, so long as that which we would chase gives run. But an ending entails a pause, a stasis, an absence. Meaning that the project of possession and pursuit stalls out here, turns in circles, idles its engine, is forced onto another track, into another form, thus,

Echo comes to Stockton from Ovid, another central textual interlocutor. In Ovid’s retelling of the myth, Narcissus spurns Echo, who then turns away from the world to a solitary life hidden in caves, “And yet her love endured, / increased even, by feeding on her sorrow.” This is the anguished optimism that Stockton nurses in Fuel as well: that somehow love—or, more generally, attachment—might extend beyond the loss of its object. A necessary enough optimism in the face of heartbreak. Do you believe in life after love? But the loss Stockton tries to face or tries to get after in Fuel isn’t just the singular loss of the lover but of something like the loss of the world at the western edge of America’s flamed-out empire. Under these circumstances we can’t, like Echo, simply offer ourselves unto some wild hollow and wither. A cave connects us to the underworld, which perhaps we could imagine as the site of attachment’s aftermath, except the underworld is itself in our present drawn ever closer in a million ways from livestreamed genocide to the perhaps more literal example in Fuel of Central Valley pumpjacks pulling oil, the stuff of the underworld, into our world:

It turns out that, like the end, the origin is likewise absent. Thus Fuel is not driven by a faith in disclosure—as if one could lift the veil, peel back enough layers, dig deep enough into the earth, to find out what one truly wanted or was or where one came from. “[I]f there was anything / to reveal I’d be made of revelations.” The ambiguity of the line’s conditional tense grants Stockton a little space to move around in amidst the doom—whether there is anything to reveal isn’t a determined fact but a contingency, a hypothetical that hovers somewhere else in some other time to the side of this one that we’re in now. “Revelation” of course also has a less than prosaic meaning, which the text’s apocalyptic meditations inevitably veer toward. In the book’s acknowledgements, Stockton reminds us that “the etymology of apocalypse is revelation: to remove the veil, to reveal.” So, more precisely, it’s not that these poems are uninterested in revelation—rather they are animated by it in this biblical, prophetic sense—but it turns out that what is behind the veil, the object of one’s pursuit, is ultimately missing, unpossessable. “this is my impossible apocalypse,” “our century’s missing origin.”

In “Soule Sermon,” immediately before the line Stockton uses as an epigraph, Mayer asks, “Can I possess a vision like an object[?]” Fuel’s implicit answer to this question turns on the like: in the end one cannot possess a vision in the form of property, of something one has and holds; but neither does one possess an “object” in this way either. So one does possess a vision like an object—in that one possesses neither. One is “made of revelation” in this sense—that what makes me is what isn’t there. Fuel wields this psychoanalytic truism as a kind of spell for invoking alternate objects and alternate scenes amidst the futures foreclosed by our “planetary death drive.” At times this spell is sounded in an optimistic key:

Here, an intimate and shared “possession” is contrasted with possession’s legal dimension as private property. In other words, this possession that is “so intricately ours” unsettles possession’s reduction to property, to ownership—possession here as something that has one as well as one has. The enjambment of “private fucking / property” clarifies as well that neither is this shared or common possession reducable to the intimate sphere of the romantic dyad: our intricate possession is not simply private fucking. Along the same lines, elsewhere we get:

Another attempt then to name an alternate form of attachment or relationality that coheres after or amidst an ending—but here this para-romantic gesture is floated more as a suggestion than a mandate or ethical imperative or gesture, a bit like a spell that one tries out not sure if one believes it is going to work but believing that having such belief would serve one better than not having it. Again then, Fuel promises or possesses no clear vision of what happens after the destabilization of the climate of a planet or of a relationship or of an economic system, but instead indexes certain movements that are afforded or demanded by the recognition of this lack of clear vision. Telling then that Stockton offers us the most direct and least conditional avowal of persistence and life in the text’s “Acknowledgements / Afterward.” Following the explication of apocalypse’s etymology, Stockton offers that:

That last sentence is of course more the standard fodder of an acknowledgements section, but given Fuel’s at turns cynical at turns optimistic account of the possibilities of attachment and relation after endings, to affirm life and indebtedness here has a different weight.

Indebtedness, like possession, as a shared property, something shuttled between loved ones. More simply, this gloss on debt turns the term away from its capture by finance capital, the language of which is littered and abandoned throughout the text: “water futures,” “subprime business,” “unliberated future scenarios,” “mineral right.” Within the political frame of Stockton’s poems there is no singular elaboration of what happens after the endings we are subjected to, but neither is this subjection understood as an agentless process, as if the pumpjacks pull oil out of the ground on their own accord. The invocation in the acknowledgements and throughout the text of a common indebtedness makes clear that the agents of these endings have names and can be targeted, that these poems are leveraged towards a “neon class war”:

To affirm that the death drive is on the side of life isn’t to assert that in the end life wins, or that there’s some singular way out of our “impossible apocalypse,” but that it’s our repeated actions and wishes and doomed attempts to return to prior states of satiation (which for Freud constituted the death drive) that afford us a kind of vital momentum:

Of course there’s a difference between being led and actually arriving. Remarkably and thankfully, Fuel offers us no vision of the latter.