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Distributed for Autumn House Press

Out of Order

Distributed for Autumn House Press

Out of Order

A debut collection featuring formally diverse poems that address topics from misogyny and mental health to race and identity.
 
Alexis Sears’s debut collection, Out of Order, is a collage of unapologetic intimacy, risk-taking vulnerability, and unwavering candor. A biracial millennial woman, Sears navigates the challenges of growing out of girlhood and into womanhood with its potential dangers, interrogating the male gaze, beauty standards, and confidence and identity. Pop culture references run through the collection, with rock icons David Bowie and Prince and poets like Kenneth Koch offering windows into desire and adaptation. In these poems, Sears works through heavy topics, such as loneliness, mental illness, chronic pain, the legacies of race and racism, and the aftermath of a father’s suicide. As she writes, “I’m learning something every ravishing day / and none of it is easy.”
 
This young poet demonstrates an uncommon mastery of craft, writing in forms including the sonnet redoublé, sestina, canzone, and villanelle. With all her linguistic skills, Sears’s work remains approachable, offering readers a striking blend of honesty, humor, anguish, joy, and surprise. Drawing influence from contemporary poets like Mark Jarman, Erica Dawson, and Tiana Clark, Sears cuts a path of her own.
 
Out of Order was the 2021 winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize.
 

104 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Donald Justice Poetry Prize

Poetry


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Reviews

"Out of Order by Alexis Sears is an irreverent interrogation of loss that insists on the poet’s right to explore grief on her own terms. Bringing a conversational tone into villanelles and sonnets, Sears unsettles readerly expectations with a singsong cadence as she meditates on a father’s suicide and on friends’ suicidal ideation."

The Poetry Foundation, Harriet Books

"The collection is even more tightly cohesive than most contemporary prizewinning books."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Sears quickly demonstrates her prowess across numerous forms. . . . Out of Order is one of the most enjoyable collections I have read in a very long time—the poems are technically sound, the language is carefully curated and surprising, the subject matter is both deeply personal and uncomfortably universal. Sears touches on the legacy of suicide and mental illness, sexual assault, navigating America as a mixed race woman. This is a collection that confronts the messiness of becoming an adult, moving ever closer to a place of healing and self-acceptance. Formally and informally, this collection sings."

Ronnie K. Stephens | The Poetry Question

"Sears’ ability to fuse absolute candor about her own vulnerabilities with formal virtuosity—even humor—is remarkable. That humor—bleak, ironic, sometimes hopeful—lends her work an electric charge, the touch of exhilaration that is art’s recompense for pain...Out of Order sings through the pain, seeking the grace to move beyond the hurt that lingers."

Literary Matters

"At a time when many of us are struggling to sustain meaning, feeling the pieces of our lives scattered in the pandemic as if we’re crows pulling at shiny bits from a trashcan, Sears’s collaging of words through form helps inspire a refreshingly cohesive narrative in which we can fi nd bits of ourselves."

Publishers Weekly

“If you have never read Sears, prepare yourself. Her poems draw blood. It’s hard to think of a debut collection since Heart’s Needle [by W.D. Snodgrass] that is at once so deeply felt and so finely tuned. In her hands, form is the fist that delivers the blow, conveying the pure force of language. With so much at stake—identity, melancholia, a father’s suicide in a distant place—feeling could easily overwhelm and blur, but Sears’s poems remain precise and richly textured. Her poems do not succumb; they triumph, as we do, thrillingly, through them.”

David Yezzi, author of Black Sea

"There is a danger in writing about yourself, your obsessions, your insecurities, your deeply personal memories, to where it is almost a workshop stricture to avoid such things where possible. Sears, though, knows that her pain is not different, and she writes about herself in a manner both critical and compassionate, analytical and empathetic, and with such technical savvy and linguistic confidence, that the reader, regardless of their biographical specifics, can not only identify with her, but viscerally understand what it is to be young (at least relatively so) in this historical moment."

 

Quincy R. Lehr, author of The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar

"Sears dazzles while writing and reckoning with form. The sonnet crown, villanelle, sestina, and epic are honed by obsessions woven with levity amidst the madness of trauma and loss. I applaud the startling specificity, emotional truths, and stunning similes spilling throughout this collection. Out of Order packs a potent poetic punch with glosses to W. H. Auden, Kurt Cobain, and crying in Priuses. Here’s to a poet that takes risks on the page with lyric grit and brilliance."

 

Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

"Sears works deftly with sonnets, crowns of sonnets, canzones, and more—but no matter the form, these are poems of finding voice and the lines beating against the form like a heart beating through the pain of repetition."

Rain Taxi

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
I.
Sky, You Don’t Get It
Objet d’Art
Golden Years
Some Days Are Harder: A Canzone
The Wedding Gown
Luck
What Is History
Skin
Hermosa Beach
At the New Year
Intimacy
On Turning Twenty

II.
For My Father: A Sonnet Redoublé

III.
Hoop Earrings, Bare Legs
Ted Bundy
Sandwich Shop Sonnet
Children of the Streets
What You’ve Heard
Seven
Riding Home, Five Years Later
Donuts
September
Memory: We’re Out of Limes

IV.
Hair Sestina
My Hair: An Epic
How to Forget That Night
Soup Over Salad
Tonsillectomy
When My Best Friend Reminds Me That Nothing Matters
On the Appearance of Angels
After
Notes to Self
Daughters
What Do You Do When the Pain Is Gone?

Notes
Acknowledgments
Thanks

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