Janaka Stucky

Janaka Stucky is a mystic poet, performer, and founding editor of the award-winning press Black Ocean. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion, and is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Ascend Ascend (2019) published by Third Man Books & Records, and as a limited fine art folio by Fulgur Press in the UK. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications such as The Huffington Post and Poetry Foundation—and has been profiled in The Believer, Vice, and BOMB Magazine.

Janaka’s poems are at once incantatory, mystic, and epigrammatic. His esoteric & occult influences, combined with a mesmeric approach to performance, create an almost ecstatic presence on stage. He has taught or performed in over 60 cities around the world.

“Janaka Stucky performs poetry readings like he's part fire-and-brimstone preacher, part doom-metal frontman … For him, lighting incense, dropping acid, and creating some of the most ecstatic lines of verse you’ve ever read is just another day at the office.”

—VICE

“Stucky’s raw works … give a dreamlike power to an antinomian religion of erotic love”

—Publishers Weekly

“He pulls from Eastern religious texts, mysticism, and the occult, and casts dirty, hallucinatory images onto graceful lines about love, resulting in a collection that is empathetic, nuanced, and wild.”

—The Kenyon Review

“Janaka Stucky‘s haunting, intense readings are some of the most gripping examples of the form you’re likely to witness.”

—Vol.1 Brooklyn

“Stucky’s verse has the power of the best East European poets—some of his poems seem to be perfect, magnificent, and instantly anthologizable. He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker.”

—Bill Knott

“Stucky has catapulted into the firmament of my favorite ecstatic writers alongside Diane di Prima, Bill Callahan, Hafiz, e.e. cummings, and Larkin Grimm.”

—Phantasmaphile