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, Janaka Stucky’s Ascend Ascendis equal parts Walt Whitman and Maggot Brain, documenting the ecstatic destruction of the self through its union with the divine.

A close look at the rigors of our current cultural moment, Julia Guez’s debut poetry collection In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame offers readers a way to navigate vital questions: what does it mean to be “secure”? How do we make art amid complexity?

The poems in Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s third collection, Dolefully, A Rampart Stands, explore rural poverty, entrapment, captivity, violence, and a longing to vanish. Ranging from free verse to a long noir prose poem, they examine who her, or our, “captors” might be.

Janaka Stucky is a mystic poet, performer, and founding editor of the award-winning press, Black Ocean. In 2015 Jack White’s Third Man Records launched Third Man Books, and chose Janaka’s collection, The Truth Is We Are Perfect, as their inaugural title. Other books include Your Name Is The Only Freedom, and The World Will Deny It For You. He has performed in over 60 cities around the world and his poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review; his articles have been published by the Huffington Post and the Poetry Foundation.

Julia Guez’s poetry, essays, interviews and translations have appeared in Poetry, the Guardian, PEN Poetry Series, the Kenyon Review, BOMB and the Brooklyn Rail. She has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation. Guez holds degrees from Rice and Columbia. She’s currently a managing director of programming for Teach for America and teaches creative writing at Rutgers in addition to writing poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two poetry collections, In No One’s Land and My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer. She is a generalist and lives in Peekskill, New York.

“Ackerson-Kiely’s talent for the uncanny is extraordinary. Her ability to create entire atmospheres through single lines elevates her poems to something approaching the oracular, while never straying from the colloquial and the quotidian … a brilliantly disquieting collection.” Rain Taxi Review