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

About the Author

Alexis Sears received her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Her first book, Out of Order, won the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize (judged by Quincy Lehr) and was published by Autumn House Press in 2022. In 2023, Judge Allison Joseph awarded it the Best Book of 2022 for the Poetry by the Sea Book Award.A scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2019, her work has been widely published and she is currentlyserving as Editor-at-Large of the Northwest Review and Contributing Editor of Literary Matters.teaches ninth-grade English in Oakland, California.

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."
*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*