Language at the End of the World

Sarah Yanni considers Rosie Stockton’s new book of poems, “Fuel.”

By Sarah YanniMay 7, 2025

• Poetry

• Environment

ROSIE STOCKTON’S LATEST poetry collection, Fuel (2025), begins with a directive to the reader: “[L]ook,” they command, “the earth has undermined / a World into a new state of water.” From the beginning of this collection, Stockton’s voice is exploratory while maintaining an unflinching gaze towards the polycrises of our time. The poems are organized into seven distinct sections rather than stand-alone works, and across these sections, Stockton brilliantly considers how extractivism, power, and desire play into both our intimate and extimate relations, with a penchant for lyricism and the subtle interplay of ecopoetic, affective, and psychoanalytical syntax.

Fuel situates the reader in various spaces—in the passenger seat of a car, in “Central Valley oil fields,” within bodies of water, in proximity to protest, and where the corporeal and the environmental converge. Although I grew up in Los Angeles, it wasn’t until my twenties (embarrassingly) that I really learned about the city’s water infrastructure, and how wealthy developers decimated the Owens Valley while concretizing our river over, all to extend profit without mercy. Stockton, also Los Angeles–based, seems to carry these histories across the book’s settings, paying close attention to the ever-woven threads of violence and desire. They pepper stunning, fragmented stanzas with plain and haunting declarations, like “there is no way to explain luxury,” while also reminding us of the indivisibility of earth and memory: “[A] pulse in the ground leads me to you.” Perhaps this is one of the primary projects of Fuel—to consider the dual sides of yearning and greed, how we all want.

Another concern that courses through the lines of this book is the role of language, both its capacities and its shortcomings. How, for instance, humans desire to make sense of nature through categorization, the way we “stop to classify the wild roses, / so we may emulate their forms.” Also, how this impulse for codification is ultimately a colonial one—thus we are urged to “make decrepit of category / make ruin of taxonomy.” Instead, we must “let light be / genuinely unnamable.” At the same time, Stockton is ever aware that the medium in which these implorations exist is one of words. They can only transcend that fact so much, but if they are going to operate within the medium, it’s for a greater cause, the words merely stand-ins for an energy rife with rebellion: “[L]yric and bursting, this body’s / my offer.” After all, “bratty planets rule my grammar,” they confess. The poems will make their points as best they can, but sometimes, they are going to have an attitude about it.

A significant portion of Fuel consists of a series of poems with the title written as “[   ],” which brings to mind Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (2002). Carson’s book presents translations of works by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, with the caveat that there are nearly no complete poems surviving. Instead, Carson translates bits and pieces, writing “[   ]” in the lost spaces of would-be language, creating miraculous puzzles out of new arrangements. With these empty brackets as titular signifiers in Fuel, we, too, are operating from a place of lack. But Fuel is always already in that lack—it’s curious about what can be found there or what can be generated. And Fuel does not pity the earth or see her as weak, either—it situates our grief alongside “water’s / unleasable joy.” In Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (2023), UC Berkeley professor Salar Mameni takes up similar investigations of geopolitics, oil, and artistic practice. Stockton’s relationship to the earth reminded me of Mameni’s concept of “petrorefusal,” which he coined in response to a petroleum fire that took 70 days for humans to extinguish. “I consider the intelligence of petroleum that refuses to be extracted from bedrock,” he notes in an interview about the book. “I call this human/oil relationality ‘petrorefusal’ in order to call attention to the unidirectional master narrative of extraction.” (Although he does not define himself as a poet, I see this wordplay as a poetic gesture nonetheless. Poetry’s capacity for meaning-making in light of existing language’s limitations is one of my most beloved aspects of the medium!) “What would it mean, for instance,” Mameni goes on, “if we understood explosions as petroleum’s refusal to leave the ground?” This impactful question asks us to rethink not only our modes of extraction but also our anthropocentric understandings of agency and hierarchy.

Fuel understands this turn toward a sort of humility and therefore does not fall into a trope of striving for beauty or perfection. Instead, Fuel is a collection about truth, which is sometimes ugly, or positions humans unfavorably, but is nonetheless real and brave. “I’m practicing comrade,” Stockton reminds us. “I’m full of drafts.” They are not imploring us to strive for purity, either. Rather, they seek the chance to “finally be bad to one another, outside this planetary death drive.” I was especially struck by this line, and its noninterest in goodness, which is maybe another way of accepting our inherent nonmagnificence while still being present and honest. Maybe goodness is better thrust upon systems, since humans are all too obsessed with finger-pointing and placing individual burdens on their neighbors. Maybe the real definition of freedom is the freedom to be bad and messy in love.

Yet the total dismissal of individual burden is not the point of Stockton’s poems, either. They do not allow us to shy away from our own involvement in systems of violence, observing how “stolen water seeps into oranges growing complicit with the vitamins we forage.” Or even how, while they “belong to order,” “disorder belongs to us.” Meaning, these are the cards we were dealt, and we are all standing in their filth, even as certain forces are surely to be blamed at much larger scales than the best of us. Still, we must ask—how can we be better? Maybe it’s through mutual aid, one of our most earnest and material forms of revolution. Stockton attempts this, no doubt: “I give away what I have none of […] I pollinate myself, become public funds.” And this notion of pollination is a potent one, for another through line in the collection is our undeniable co-reliance—and what occurs when we release a striving for selfhood. “I want to be nothing / but of things,” Stockton states. “[I]n company, my prayers fracture / beautifully.” This seemingly simple shift in perspective could be what is needed to engage in true protest against the greed and narcissism that permeate both our past and present. “I get as breakable as possible / only then could unison whisper / to me,” Stockton writes, which I take as an impulse toward negative capability, that fecundity found in open surrender. Not to be the person who always brings in Mary Oliver, but to bring in Mary Oliver—I thought of her poem “Lead,” which closes with the lines: “I tell you this / to break your heart, / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.” And I do think there is much to be gleaned from this passage written by my favorite low-key-lesbian, nature-loving Catholic, and much that corresponds to Stockton’s investigations, because both writers are inviting readers to consider breakage as a site of possibility. They are returning to the reminder that breakage is inevitable, exploring “how it happens / how it’s happening / all the time.”

Among the permanence of these catastrophes—named plainly: worsening climate crises, fires, drought, oil extraction, the privatization of water, and so on—the scale of the book does not remain constantly in the grandiose. It often returns to the space of two comrades, or the space of one’s own heart. Stockton’s work effectively performs this tightening of scale on a word-choice level, through lines like “this is my impossible apocalypse / my fault line friction” or “like water I gather / your loose ends up in my / barely braided arms.” In these lines, we encounter the interplay of ecology and body, wrangling the vastness of an elemental concept and attaching it to the speaker’s subjectivity, their private confessions and desires. Whatever is out of reach collapses, found in our very hands. This intimate scale is conjured time and time again, especially in the series of poems titled “Dear End,” which conclude every section. I took these works, consistently structured in couplets, as a series of love poems, both to an ambiguous romantic object and maybe to death itself.

They seem, too, to be poems of grief. In her poetry collection Obit (2020), Victoria Chang grapples with parental death, and although Stockton’s work seems more concerned with a sort of big, earth-sized grief—a collective permagrief—lines from Chang’s work kept reappearing in my memory as I worked through Fuel. In Obit, Chang writes: “To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape”; she also notes “the way grief is really about future absence.” Those who grieve for the earth are those who are able to empty the mind of the colonial fantasy and imagine the future depletion and emptiness that will undoubtedly await us (and which is largely already here, behind the spectacle). They are those who can see the water flowing and know that somewhere else is drying up and dying for this momentary gain. Stockton is one of those grievers but is also one who takes up Chang’s offer to find a new shape. Through both works, I think we all arrive at the possibility that love can counteract that grief, briefly, sweetly. In one “Dear End,” Stockton writes, “In wanting you, all becomes you,” reminding us of desire’s all-consuming tendency. Returning to earlier musings on language, another “Dear End” offers: “When I look at you it’s rarely with proper grammar,” which is a gorgeous manifestation of desire’s otherworldliness—if grammar is the colonizing space, then love liberates us from it.

The final two sections of the book, “Pumpjack” and “Limit,” present two distinct tonalities. “Pumpjack” reads like an urgent, operatic sequence—an epic poem of ecological destruction. It tells tales of “poetry pumped into the feed / at high pressures as clouds burn off / like untranslatable stories,” weaving tight lines with alternating tabulations. “Pumpjack” is like the scene at the end of a road trip movie, one of momentum, reckoning, and reflection. Seemingly addressing a single subject, Stockton writes, “I was burying you when you called”—another moment of collapsing body and earth, thereby reminding us that processes of death and repair are happening on a planetary scale. These lines feel like a micro-elegy or some kind of impulse toward whatever the opposite of extraction might be. They represent moments of sitting with the ways that we care for one another and then let each other go. “[C]hasm demanded us, so we chasmed,” Stockton says. Yet “there is no death that could suture us.” Do we have less control than we think, or more? My answer to this oscillates, but surely—love is a force that pokes a hole in gravity and its most fierce agents.

Among the closing lines of the book, Stockton writes, “imagine thinking stars are just those little dots,” and I nearly clapped out loud, reading the book alone on my IKEA sofa. Yes! I wanted to declare—imagine! Stockton does not fall into a reductive or nihilistic point of view, and I think that’s one of the most radical and powerful aspects of their poetry. They implore us to look—at both what is happening beneath our very feet and what is beyond, what is not understandable or even fully conscious to us. Perhaps it is within this perspective that we are activated to be better stewards. “I say my evening prayer,” Stockton says in a “Dear End” poem: “May we slip away unnoticed.” Thus, Fuel is an urgent call to break down violent systems, not to make heroes of ourselves, or even to be in equal harmony with the earth, but to let our marks be irrelevant and forgotten while the earth reclaims her agency.

In the final “Dear End,” Stockton gifts us these lines: “I’m a habituated creature. I always thank my objects. / Not as a political horizon but as an honest feeling,” which is the greatest testament to Stockton’s character and to Fuel’s purpose. None of this is show; none of this is performative activism. We are in the company of someone who hopes, despite everything. What a privilege that is.