Out of Order

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. “On Turning Twenty” immediately confronts the reader with contrasting registers in its opening lines: “One afternoon, my father chose to die. / He was like, See ya later, guys.” 

Complicating the speaker’s grief is her inability to feel grounded within an ambiguous racial identity, as we learn in “What Is History”:

when the syrup-skinned girls at the Black Student Union
asked “What are you?” and “Why are you here?” […]

In “Intimacy,” creative writing workshops leave their mark on the speaker who recalls a professor asking: “Do you think you’re Milton?” and who, in “Notes to Self,” commands herself to “[f]orget the poetry workshop when a boy told you to stop / using your pain as scenery.” While Sears has the final word here, asserting “pain is scenery: encompassing, everywhere,” I couldn’t help but wish for more assertions like this one, unencumbered by origin stories that seem to anticipate and preemptively react to an academic readership and shut out other ways of reading and interacting with these poems. 

In “Hermosa Beach,” which is orientated sideways to accommodate longer lines, we see how “the ocean runs over the rocks like blood on bony kneecaps,” which calls to another image from “My Hair: An Epic,” of “kneecaps like potholes / in ripped-up Abercrombie jeans.” Sears has a wonderfully transformative imagination when she lets it run, and a poem like “Skin” delights in its ability to shuttle us between different realities: 

I close my eyes and we’re in a kitchen

with bright yellow walls, swing-dancing
to Bowie and the Strokes while the biscuits burn,

hard like the boulders beside us, black as the rapids below