Dolefully, A Rampart Stands

by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Overview

A collection of haunting, image-rich poems about isolation, captivity, and vanishing.

The poems in Paige Ackerson-Kiely's third collection are set primarily in the rural northeast of America, and 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. Ackerson-Kiely is interested in characters who are aware of their foibles, and who find ways to turn away from those problems in search of connection and freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525504610
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Series:	Penguin Poets
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

Inventory of Ramparts
 
The pier shed its long
splinters into the lake.
 
A dinghy rubbed the side of the dock
but the dock was still.
 
Some kids ditched a canoe in the reeds
—the boy’s voice was a reed—
 
they pulled it up the embankment by a rope
where no one could see it from water
 
or shore. His voice covered everything.
This isn’t an opportunity to talk about the body,

how many dogs you get to have over
the course of a life. I’d reckon 6, if you take
 
good care of them. I’m going back in time
to hold the boy’s head underwater.
 
Just to give him a little scare. The canoe
had vanished when they returned
 
and his voice became a basket
pushed down a river—nothing specific—
 
and anyway, this isn’t an occasion to talk
about the body. I’m busy going, I need

to go, back through those boggy years to kiss
all of the dogs. Hard, on the mouth.

Table of Contents

Inventory of Ramparts 1

The Lesson 5

Inheritance 6

Shine 7

Simple Story Of Illumination 8

The Rose Bush 9

The Cardinal 10

Folding Chairs 11

S. 12

Laconia 13

Murmuration 15

All Around The Mulberry Bush 16

The Pine Tree 17

Working Stiff 21

Adopting a New Currency 22

Work as a Man 23

Captivity 24

Winter Moth 25

Meadow Redaction 26

Ballad of Little Preparation 28

Liberation Poem 29

The Grandmothers 30

Hole in the Wall 31

Administration 32

Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed 35

Love Poem #41 59

Ellesmere Island 60

Springtime in America 61

How the Town Looks 63

Made to Lie Down in Green Pastures 65

Exposure 72

Trestle 73

The Last Thing You See 74

Notes 77

Acknowledgments 79

Editorial Reviews

12/17/2018

Ackerson-Kiely’s third book of poems begins ominously. Some kids push a canoe into a river, but “this isn’t an occasion to talk/ about the body.” The long prose poem sequence “Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed” returns to the found body—after an interruption for some other fine poems, including “Shine,” a love poem, and “The Pine Tree” (“When you put on a dress you get to die”). The setting could be any rural U.S. area, where young people gather to imitate adults and girls bear the brunt of it (a particularly gruesome instance is recalled in “Laconia”). Ackerson-Kiely’s strength is in crafting a prose poem dense with plot and surprise: “Coroner’s report biblical. Sodomized, blunt force trauma. Maybe a/ brick from a hopeful construction site. The town dying slowly, all day I troll the someday graves.” The title appears in Made to Lie Down in Green Pastures,” a long poem wrapped around a figure called “The President.” Told to lie down, the speaker shape-shifts: “Our small apartment faced the park./ My President sent his very best./ I wore the barren ice-field dress/ until the grass began to poke through.” The language here is stark and devastating, but the reader could use more help in places. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Dolefully, A Rampart Stands:

“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 . . . Dolefully, a Rampart Stands announces a pastoral poetry for the 21st Century . . . a brilliantly disquieting collection.” —Rain Taxi Review

“Playful, punchy, clever, and strange, Ackerson-Kiely’s poems are on-rhythm and off-center . . . some of the most unique pieces you’ll read this year.” –The Millions, "Must-Read Poetry" 

“Dark, yet brimming with life.” —HelloGiggles 

“Ackerson-Kiely sketches a landscape in which sexism and economic oppression are indelibly linked . . . [revealing] the ways that power, censorship, and disbelief are internalized, as they live with us in our most solitary moments, and they circumscribe what is possible within our dreaming.” –Kristina Marie Darling, Kenyon Review 

“[Paige Ackerson-Kiely]’s third collection pulls no punches in depicting rural life, rustic customs, and the concerns of bar patrons and working folks. Her poems frequently escape into wildly imaginative imagery . . . consistently one of the most nuanced poets writing today, [she] offers evocative and unmatched verisimilitude.” –Booklist


Praise for My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer:

“Funny and wild with expertly conceived images . . . [Ackerson-Kiely’s] poems make the familiar more familiar . . . and remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” —Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune

“Dark, full of nature, and full of life, this collection will snarl its way into your soul.” —Flavorwire

From the Publisher