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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.
"Sears’s book is a winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and you’ll find few modern poets with a truer relationship to the power of form. Sears works deftly with sonnets, crowns of sonnets, canzones, and more—but no matter the form, these are poems of fi nding voice and the lines beating against the form like a heart beating through the pain of repetition." —Rain Taxi
"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." —Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation
"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." —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." —Literary Matters
"Alexis Sears’s debut collection posits grief as a form of its own. A fitting winner for the 2021 Donald Justice Prize, the collection is rife with formal poems and tightly controlled rhyme. . . . Delivered with unwavering candor, the grief at the heart of this collection is a gift of trust: we’ve followed our heroine through poems of depression, microaggressions of biracial identity, and yearning. Thus, when the time comes, she’s left us prepared for the unadorned honesty of her loss." —MudRoom
"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." —Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
"If you have never read Alexis Sears, prepare yourself. Her poems draw blood. . . . Her poems do not succumb; they triumph, as we do, thrillingly, through them." —David Yezzi, author of Black Sea