Reviewed by Janice Northerns

How can one put in order a life that has been disrupted by a father's suicide, the struggle to find racial identity, a maze of bad relationships, and the crippling specter of depression? This is the central question with which Alexis Sears grapples in her debut collection Out of Order. While it is a mistake to conflate a poem's speaker with the author, Sears gives us permission to read her work autobiographically, stating on her website, "my poems tell the story of my life . . ." The poems in Out of Order are intensely personal and revolve around a search for identity, often in conjunction with the analysis of her relationships with men (including her father). And the men do not come off well—Sears skewers them at every turn. In "Objet d'Art" she imagines a life where there are "no men who leave without an explanation," while in "Donuts," Sears confesses "I can't fight a man's ego, his appetite, hunger." Several of her poems recount sexual assault. The trauma is clear, as in this encounter in "What You've Heard":

When a friend of mine forced himself on me
in a cozy bar in Federal Hill
The flush-faced men at the next table
Applauded. Give it to her!

In the stark prose poem "Memory: We're Out of Limes" she a writes of a confusing evening: "I don't remember what happened first, how the night ended or how / it started."  But we get the picture in fragmented flashes such as "Him forcing himself on me while the men applauded" and in snippets of overheard conversation: "‘Is she even conscious?'" One of the most chilling examples of her mistreatment at the hands of a man comes in the poem "Ted Bundy," as Sears weaves descriptions of a former lover together with scenes from a movie about the infamous serial rapist and murderer:

and sometimes, when I lie in bed alone,
I think about the way he'd wrap his hands
around my throat and squeeze. I didn't know
if this was normal. He never once asked
for my permission.

Her bleak portrayal of men perhaps speaks to how much of the collection is devoted to the author's absent father, who committed suicide when Sears was just eleven. Section II is comprised of one long poem, the masterful "For My Father: A Sonnet Redoublé." This crown of sonnets is not an ode or a tribute to a dead father; rather, it is an indictment of him—for leaving her so young, for leaving her with so very little to go on. Sears is sometimes wistful and yearning when she writes of her father, but just as often bitter and angry, as in the third sonnet of "For My Father:" "I'm learning everything. You never taught me / anything, really, so I teach myself." References to the huge hole his death left in her life run throughout the book, adding up to a sad catalog of loss and grief.

The author's longing for her father is bound up in her search for identity, particularly racial identity. Sears is biracial, and her father, as the black parent, is the one who should have schooled her in the ways of blackness, she feels. Several poems address this topic, including two wonderful pieces about black hair, "Hair Sestina" and "My Hair: An Epic." In both poems, her hair, "neither black nor white," is a metonym for her biracial self. In the opening lines of "My Hair: An Epic," she says of her hair: "It never knew how to behave, a problem / child long before I was." These poems are witty (as are many other pieces in the collection) but also pointed. In "Hair Sestina," she writes, "Some bus driver says, ‘You're ‘black' / in name, but you will never really know / their struggles.'" Sears senses she isn't "black enough" for black folks, and yet white boys definitely see her as black. In "Skin," a boy tells her, "The girls where I'm from don't look like you. / Rhode Island is like vanilla bean ice cream. No color." Near the end of "Hair Sestina," Sears asks, "What's the point of being brilliant / when I . . .  lack / inheritance and understanding?" These two missing pieces—inheritance and understanding—are deeply twined for her. Her absent father has robbed her of any inheritance and thus left her bereft of understanding how to exist in the world as a black person. She continues by acknowledging her father's struggles while still holding him to account:

it wouldn't be right to call
what happened to me abandonment. See, life
can be too hard for us, including my black
father, once-Marine, 6'2", without
someone to speak to, even me. Not brilliant,
but he could have helped me come to know
my hair, my blackness, self.

In this brief admission of her father's own troubles, Sears hints at a fear that surfaces elsewhere in her poetry—that her father's bouts with mental illness may be the true legacy he's left her. She mentions therapy in her poems, and the closing line of "For My Father: A Sonnet Redoublé" spells out her worry that she may end her life in the same way that he did, as she addresses him directly: "See you! Someday may be soon."

While most of Out of Order details the poet's struggle to come to terms with her father's suicide and to find a sense of self, there is a narrative arc in this collection and a clear turning point in the last section. Near the end, we find the joyous, hopeful "Soup Over Salad." Sears expresses acceptance in these lines: "Every year, I apologize / to him, to myself." And she acknowledges that she has matured and has found solace through writing: "I don't cry daily. Vodka with Redbull doesn't excite / me. Instead, I arrange, rearrange words, more than enough / to keep me from sinking away."

In a volume that speaks primarily to disarray, one prominent technique Sears employs to impose order is formal poetry. Out of Order opens with a villanelle, and Sears also includes a sonnet sequence, a crown of sonnets, a sestina, a canzone, and many other poems that utilize regular rhyme schemes. In "Intimacy" she explains the connection between her reliance on form and her need for order: "Formal poetry makes me feel safe and sane." She is clearly adept at formal poetry, so adept that in most of her formal work the form takes a backseat to content. We can appreciate and admire her skill as she runs these poems through their paces—the rhymes don't feel forced; the form is appropriate to subject and never contrived.

But the collection also contains a fair number of poems written in free verse, and some of these are the most powerful pieces in the book. "Ted Bundy," "What You've Heard," "How to Forget that Night," and "Luck" feel in some ways bolder and more direct than her formal poetry, as if by stripping away the scaffolding, Sears can at last get to the heart of what she wants to say. In "Luck," she muses over her therapist telling her she's "lucky" she didn't find her father's body, then moves immediately to more mundane examples of luck: "Finding / that missing sock, a wrinkle-free twenty on concrete." She poses a sardonic question: "luck is funny, isn't it?" and closes by admitting she is "more haunted / by the choppy shots of him—close-ups of his silver car, / his teeth—than the shot I can only imagine." After telling us in "Intimacy" that "Formal poetry makes me feel safe and sane," she reveals, "Perhaps that's why I stopped writing it." Her formal technique is splendid, but equally impressive is her ability and willingness to break free from what she deems "safe." Working without a net, the author's poetry soars.

Out of Order is a formidable debut, and whether Sears veers away from formal poetry or continues to write in a mixture of styles, we can anticipate that she will focus the same honest gaze and keen talent on her next subject.