The Spring 2019 issue of the Sewanee Review publishes online on March 18, and the print version will begin arriving in mailboxes later that same week. The issue took shape nearly a year ago.

If you see the sonnet’s architecture underneath my poem, then that architecture, its foundation, is what makes the poem possible. The architecture inaugurates something to speak. How could I possibly want to dismantle that?

My only rule to myself with these stories was that something needed to happen. No fair just throwing pretty language at the page. They had to do the usual heavy lifting of storytelling that is, by my lights, fiction’s job.

I was happy. I slept in their bed,
I read the mysteries on their shelves.
 
Always something precious gone,
someone hot on the trail.

Although suffering and existence are inextricably linked in the stanza, the world is not “evil” or “doomed.” It is dusty. And in that dusty world we can work. The work is communal, ours.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s poetry plays with setting and situation, inverting the everyday with an uncommon, often unsettling ease. Her third, and newest collection, Dolefully, A Rampart Stands, manages some strange and arresting lines, accretions of imagery, and sharp language.

Looking at stanzas in a foreign alphabet, like Russian, is a reminder of the inherent beauty of the form as it patterns the blank page. That too is an optical illusion—it tells you nothing of the quality of thought in that foreign language—but it’s a start; it makes you want to know.

It's a book that naturally asks a lot of questions—about involuntary hospitalization; about whether mental illness is a part of us or an addition to us, to be eliminated or quieted as much as possible; about spirituality and illness; about how higher education institutions treat their students who are dealing with mental health issues.

The stories had to keep coming, one after the other, the one more beautiful than the next, or else the king would have your head.