Rosie Stockton

Rosie Stockton is a poet and scholar. They received a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of California Los Angeles in 2026. Their dissertation examined the character of carceral social reproduction in late twentieth-century California in order to trace the racial and sexual politics by which the carceral state manages and immiserates criminalized populations rendered surplus in capitalist crisis. Through an analysis of anticarceral print culture and love poetry written by women, trans, and nonbinary people serving extreme sentences in US prisons, their research attends to questions of reproduction, intimacy, and kinship mobilized in anticarceral political formations. Their project at ICI Berlin will expand on carceral poetics as a critical contribution to a larger queer anticarceral critique of social reproduction.

They have written two poetry books, Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) and Fuel (Nightboat Books 2025). Their poetry has appeared in Lithub, Poetry Society of America, Social Text Journal, Broadcast, and Tripwire. They also write about art, politics, and psychoanalysis as a regular contributor to Parapraxis Magazine.

This project develops a concept of carceral negativity through a study of twentieth-century prison poetry and its relation to love as it is shaped, disorganized, and destituted within carceral infrastructures. Central to this investigation is the claim that the US carceral regime reproduces itself via fundamental contradictions of social reproduction that are facilitated by the fantasy of romantic love. Apostrophic forms of poetry written from the standpoint of captivity contribute to the demystification of processes of valorization and reproduction under carceral capitalism.

Framed through the concept of ‘dehiscence’, as theorized in a politicized psychoanalysis and Black studies, these poems articulate negative labours, foreclosures, and heartbreaks cleaved to carcerally mediated intimacy. These poems form an anti-carceral archive of autoreductive love that rupture dominant grammars of freedom, wholeness, and redemption. Rather than asserting only reparative forms of relation or subjectivity, these poems read as insurgent articulations of negativity that dwell in the wound of unfreedom, redirecting love’s destructive and reductive capacity against captivity itself.