Julie Westhale

And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we’ve all needed—even if we didn’t realize we needed them. 

Rosie Stockton’s collection, Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books, May 2021) is equal parts lamentation and psalms: “[W]here I grind the language / out of myself,” they write, and “everyone is invited / to my / biggest storm.” The poems contained in Permanent Volta take on many forms (sestinas, bent sonnets, fragments, prose, etc.) in which readers can find themselves as individuals: “look at how my worlds / want your worlds / look at our worlds / wanting other worlds / porous the mist we / love by.” Readers will further find themselves in Stockton’s syntax, in which the language of poetry is artfully and self-consciously considered. The poems are intentional in their grammar and refuse to bend to the will of the workshop. The effect of Stockton’s language—fragmented and lovely and conscious of construction—invites us to consider poetry as an industry itself. If we, as readers and poets, decide to create our own grammar, what does this say about language as a tool of conquest? What does this say about our own unwillingness to be conquered?

Permanent Volta is not only a meditation on poetry. It is in its meditations on queerness, on body, and on the very throughline of emotionality—a manifestation of the collection’s namesake. As a concept, “permanent volta” implies a perpetual moment of shifting, suspended in time. In a sonnet, this occurs when the tone changes—when the lover leaves, when morning comes, when the plate falls from the hand and shatters. In Stockton’s collection, as in the title, Permanent Volta is the very way of writing. 

This is perhaps one of the many blessings of Stockton’s words: the insistence on poetry as a place for recreation. They write, “is my boundary exquisite to you? / is it / knowable? / isn’t this having?” And, “that’s a metaphor for my anguish. / Can you see my head against the window? / I’ve never believed in the forever of anything / except the wretched present.” The very nature of this insistence is in and of itself a queer thing. Even when we sit still, we are scrutinized.

What could be more clever than conflating the form and stuff of poems with the form and stuff of eternal volta? In Stockton’s words, “I’m ending this poem now, yes it’s over / a hungry ghost, / nothing has changed.”

“Old man,” he said, for he did not know his name, but the old man did not stir, so he remained in the old man’s bed, waiting for daybreak, watching him sleep, thinking about, if he had to choose, would he choose Pepa or the ship, wondering whether love was just an excuse for cowardice. When dawn came, the old man was still sleeping, so he left him to his dreams and found his way back to the river.” (98)

And here we have Anne Raeff’s newest novel, a celebration of time, space, and woven narrative. The novel traces the stories of a half dozen people all intertwined, over the span of about fifty years.  Throughout the passage of time and the history of the world (wars, guerrilla movements, the spread of yellow fever, the coming and going of queer tourists, and love lost and found) the central crux of the story is the celebration of connection—however fleeting.

Fleeing to Nicaragua from Vienna during a worn-torn era, Pepa and her family settle in the jungle town of El Castillo. While there, Pepa’s parents contract yellow fever, leaving her to wander, learn about, and fall in love with both Nicaragua’s lush landscape, and its inhabitants. In particular, Pepa finds herself thrown into a love story with a local named Guillermo, who shows her how to find home in a new place, and a new way.

Pepa’s world comes further into chaos and heartbreak when her family abruptly decides to move to New York. Straddling the boundaries and borders of love, passion, and geography, Only the River shows two things simultaneously: what parallel universes can look like, writ large, and also the fragmentation that happens due to war, fleeing, and settlement. The idea of home, in people and places.

It is wonderful to see multi-generational narratives that involve queerness as fluidly as queerness happens—that is to say, queerness as normalized. Guillermo and his foray into blurred spaces with the two German lovers, Liliana, left by her wife and pining. In this novel, queerness is not a static land that one enters or leaves—it is as running and evolving and changing as the river around which this story revolves.

In our modern world, we need more depictions of love like this, more depictions of landscape like this, more depictions of what love can look like when it is told from many angles—with both the light and the dark. As in her novel about WWII (Winter Kept Us Warm), Raeff has a remarkable ability to be able to take us to new places—fantastical new places—on often well-trot soil. What’s more, the stories Raeff tells, and the fluency with which they are told, earn their place in a canon that is timeless, classic, and necessary. This is a triumph of a novel and a must-read for our times.