Ascend, Ascend
Authored by: Janaka Stucky
Published by: Fulgur Press & Third Man Books
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 – the Star and Snake Arts Centre – Ascend Ascend is Janaka Stucky’s most powerful book to date.
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. Intestines tangle into an aria. The sky is gallowed. At the center of this apocalyptic devastation stands the speaker of these poems, asserting: I explode. I shall love. I ascend. Stucky’s verse reminds us that even as we sink deeper and deeper into unknown darkness, we become our own flashlight beaming outward.
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.
Bibliography
Hardback Edition
Published by: Fulgur Press
Publication date: 2021
Original price: £30
Number of Copies Printed: Limited to 175 copies.
Contributors
Illustrated by: K Lenore Siner
Introduced by: Pam Grossman
Physical Description
Dimensions: 12 x 7.5 inches (30.7cm x 19cm).
Page Count: 136 pages.
Illustrative content: 7 black and white images.
Other physical details: Signed and numbered copies.
Binding
Binding: Bound in premium two-tone cloth with silver endpapers.
Paperback Edition
Published by: Third Man Books
Publication date: 2019.
ISBN: 9780997457834
Original price: $13.46
Contributors
Cover by: Aaron Horkey
Hardback Edition
Published by: Third Man Books
Publication Date: 2019
Original price: $20
Contributors
Cover by: Aaron Horkey
Physical Description
Other physical details: Signed copies.
Binding
Binding: Hardbound with black-on-black foil debossed cover, with the illustration by Aaron Horkey printed across the inside front cover and end paper.
Content Note
Accompanying material: Issued wrapped in a black kona cotton band, silkscreened with the book’s seven sigils, which can be removed and applied as a back patch.
Digital Edition
Published by: Third Man Books
Original price: $9.99
