Ascend Ascend

Signed limited hardcover edition also available here. “Janaka Stucky is extraordinary, and his work riveting.” —Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin Equal parts Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Ascend Ascend makes us both passenger and witness as we participate in the ecstatic destruction of the self through its union with the divine. The long poem was written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals while secluded in the tower of a 100-year-old church. If you experienced Stucky's first book, The Truth is We are Perfect, for Third Man Books, then Ascend Ascend is a must read. Rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of Hekhalot literature, which chronicles an ascent up the Kabbalistic Tree of Life to witness the Merkabah, or “chariot of God,” this book-length poem drafts a surreal, mythological landscape in which maximalist language shreds the natural world. Light becomes rainbowed sex.