Out of Order (Autumn House Press, 2022):
Winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry By the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022.
SYNOPSIS:
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.
PRAISE:
“If you have never read Alexis 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 More Things in Heaven: New & Selected Poems
“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. Alexis 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 his or her 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
“Alexis 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 who takes risks on the page with lyric grit and brilliance.”- Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
REVIEWS AND DISCUSSION:
Review: Out of Order by Alexis Sears by James Davis, American Literary Review
“Dreams of Growing to Rock a Rhyme”: Tradition and Experiment in Recent American Sonnets by Brian Brodeur, Spoon River Poetry Review
Putting Things Back Together: On Alexis Sears’s “Out of Order” by Maryann Corbett, Los Angeles Review of Books
Fluent Phrases on a Silver Chain: On Finding Poetry in Song and Song in Poetry by Ned Balbo, Literary Matters
A Review of Alexis Sears and Luke Hathaway by Brooke Clark, Able Muse
The Poetry of Poetry: Three Recent Debuts by Austin Allen, Hopkins Review Features
Out of Order by Gale Hemmann, Rain Taxi Review of Books
Out of Order by Janice Northerns, The Rupture
Out of Order- A Review by Ayesha Shibli, Mudroom Mag
Poetry Review: Alexis Sears’ Out of Order by Clarence Caddell, The Borough
Review: Out of Order by Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation
The Beauty of Being: Our Eighteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets (recommended) by John Belk, Poets and Writers magazine
Christmas Once Again at Claremont (recommended) by A.M Juster, Claremont Review of Books
671: September on The Slowdown, Ada Limón (Podcast)
Buy yours from Autumn House Press, , Amazon, or University of Chicago Press (or better yet— support independent bookstores!) today!