Review: Out of Order by Alexis Sears

Reviewed by James Davis

Autumn House Press. 2022. 104 pages.

The title page of Alexis Sears’s debut poetry collection, Out of Order, looks exactly like the kind of printed sign you might see taped to a laundromat dryer. Entering the book is like entering a broken machine, one that says both leave me alone and I need attention. This machine, we come to learn over the span of the collection’s 34 poems, is the human mind—not just the mind of the poems’ speaker, a mixed-race 24-year-old poet grieving the death of her father, but also of the reader, whom the poems address confidently and intimately. “I think it’s right / to be naïve and vulnerable,” declares the poem “Some Days Are Harder,” a canzone which mounts a defense for the romantic word “adore”: “It’s for the aching soul, you see: / it’s like Camembert, like lounging by the sea.” Out of Order invites the reader to lounge in brokenness, to be unproductive. It positions reading and writing poetry as pleasurable, if not particularly useful, activities. We may not leave the collection repaired, but we will leave having experienced a great deal of care.

The title doesn’t mean the book or its poems are messy—certainly not formally. It doesn’t take much sophistication to grasp the irony of Out of Order containing a perfectly wrought Dantean canzone, as well as a slew of other challenging fixed forms. Rather, the mess comes through disclosure of the self—or, rather, selves. The opening villanelle, “Sky, You Don’t Get It,” contains two refrains that speak to the composite, mutable nature of selfhood. The A₁ refrain, “I’m learning something every ravishing day,” suggests that experience is both quotidian and ravishing, a word with light and dark resonances. Like it or not, the lessons of experience change who we are, “and none of it is easy.” The A₂ refrain confirms this change: “My former self has drifted miles away.” At the center of the collection is a question: What is the point of preserving the self through writing when who we are is so fickle, so inconstant, that we don’t recognize ourselves from the day before? At best, who we were becomes a sort of sky: all-encompassing and distant, “prettiest on sad days, way / too beautiful to understand this shit.” Talking to the clouds is a poetic stereotype, one this villanelle and the book at large are keenly aware of. “It’s so cliché / to have some loud internal screaming fit,” the speaker concedes mid-poem. It’s messy, this simultaneous revulsion and embrace of poetic self-absorption. And yet, through the elegance of the villanelle’s repetitions and the reliability of the pentameter, everything “fits.” The mess and order strike a surprisingly harmonious chord.

In some ways, the book is what you would expect of a formalist poet’s debut: a catalogue of nonce and inherited forms, especially the sonnet, which is featured in standalone pieces, linked sonnets, and a showstopping sonnet redoublé that takes up the entirety of the book’s second section. What sets it apart from other such debuts is its keen consciousness of what the reader expects; it both gratifies and foils our formal expectations through a variety of subtle choices. For instance, “For My Father” (the sonnet redoublé) ends with the characteristic, tour-de-force fifteenth sonnet composed of each of the preceding fourteen sonnets’ first lines. However, Sears abandons the rhyme scheme in the final sonnet, opting for blank verse instead. All that survives of the rhyme scheme is the unsettling slant rhyme of the closing couplet: “man, no matter. Who’s our girl? Who won? / (Perhaps I?) See you! Someday may be soon.” In a poem addressed to the speaker’s deceased father, the unsettled quality is poignant and fitting. The overall effect of the slant rhyme, the erratic punctuation, the fragmented syntax, and the affected casualness (“See you!”) is irresolution, not what you’d expect from such a curtain call. The reader feels the machine breaking down here, the gears grinding to a halt. This closing argues for the ongoingness of grief and challenges notions of poetry as “self-care.” Sit in the disrepair, it asks the reader, for this too is part of the machine. “I’ve found myself completely blameless / in my new arrangement,” the poem says, speaking of its own unorthodox form and the transformative power of tragedy.

The book comes in four sections, loosely themed. Besides the sonnet redoublé that is Section II, the most thematically distinct section is IV, which opens with two poems on the speaker’s hair. The first, simply titled “Hair Sestina,” is among the collection’s strongest pieces, using the form’s retrogradatio cruciata to evoke the tangling of hair and mixed-race identity:

The teleutons (i.e. the sestina’s repeating end words) tell their own little story: know all brilliant life without black. “Brilliant” suggests the shine of curls and intellect, which “know” and “all” infuse with a hint of over-achievement. Life without black speaks to the speaker’s estrangement from her blackness, which comes from her “black / father,” a line-break mimicking other, larger separations. In the sestina’s envoi, we get a similar fragmented syntax as in the final couplet of “For My Father”: “[M]y hair, my blackness, self. Oh, well. Without / some emptiness, what’s life? Twenty-four. ‘Brilliant.’ / ‘Accomplished.’ All I know is what I don’t.” Again, this syntactical breakdown challenges notions of poetry-as-therapy. The form is fixed, but the speaker isn’t.  

Though I’ve quoted mainly from poems in fixed and inherited forms, the collection is equally accomplished in its vers libre pieces. One such poem late in the collection, “Notes to Self,” speaks to the collection’s complicated outlook on grief and poetry-as-self-care:

Here, the collection anticipates its own criticism. A certain critic may read Out of Order as indulgent and self-pitying, romanticizing personal tragedy at the exclusion of the reader. But like the sky of the first poem, the pain in “Notes to Self” is so pervasive it must become a kind of aesthetic. The way the poem fragments and italicizes the boy’s critique—Stop. Your pain. Scenery—turns these words into paint swatches, or teleutons in an imaginary sestina. Turning the elements of personal trauma—in this book’s case, the death of a father and the exclusion borne of mixed-race parentage—into art is a well-traveled path in contemporary poetry collections. However, this collection’s awareness and whole-hearted embrace of the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in universalizing personal experience make the book feel new and necessary. Like its marriage of high formalism and dressed-down content—donuts, The Smashing Pumpkins, “ripped-up Abercrombie jeans”—the book’s balance of self-critique and self-acceptance rings true.

The collection ends in a free-verse poem titled with a question: “What Do You Do When the Pain Is Gone?” This short piece nicely contains many of the book’s leitmotifs: the city of Baltimore, rock music (“Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads”), junk food (“a paper-wrapped churro”), and the freedom and frolic of friendship: “my two best friends / make a beeline for the vibrators…They giggle, / You’re adorable, innocent, like a child.”  This poem’s last three words are “I’m not sure.” While the speaker has come, at least temporarily, out of the fog of grief, there is no instruction manual for how to operate now that she is operational. Rebirth, too, feels vulnerable—learning something every day is not easy. The “Out of Order” sign has been removed from the machine, but it doesn’t quite work the same. Even when we’re back in order, we will never be fixed. Sears’s poetry sings this and other human contradictions with humble mastery.

James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q (Waywiser 2020), which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poetry has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio, as well as in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, Bennington Review, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. A PhD candidate at the University of North Texas, he serves as Poetry Editor for American Literary Review and teaches literature and creative writing. His website is jamesdavispoet.com.