Good cultural objects have a way of tying the present to the past while providing some celestial points for sailing into future waters. This is basically a very human thing, using our nostalgia, or at least our perception of the past, as well as engaging a sort of inherent need to contextualize the moment in which we’re living. In Ascend, Ascend, Janaka Stucky reaches back into poetry’s mythic and mystical past and brings it into our moment, one in which the primary focus of publishing appears to be an emphasis on identity and exploring the self through the ways in which we live embodied lives external to us.
