Out of Order by Eileen Ivey Sirota

“You’ve got some nerve telling me / that thingy is not a perfectly good word.” Out of Order explores the intimacy of aging in a time that never stops demanding our energy, our protest. A daughter pins herself with the button that her father wore when marching fifty years earlier; a speaker reckons with her “EZ-Pass white skin”; pasta and pomegranates are offered up as a stay against mortality, while winter is documented in “swelling stacks of dirty cocoa cups.” Author Eileen Sirota‘s seemingly effortless choices in image are belied by her formal acuity—per haiku sequences and the abecedarian “Gender Studies”—and her deftly musical phrasing. These poems both disturb and delight.
–Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves

In Out of Order poet Eileen Ivey Sirota takes us on a funhouse ride where life promises you “picnics and puddings,” but “makes you eat ashes and dirt.” Her collection includes all generations, from her doting Bubbe, to herself as a young mother holding her infant, “the scent of talc rising like yeast in new-made bread.” Politics is a recurring theme, as the author remembers the joy she felt at Obama’s 2008 Inauguration and the exuberance of the Woman’s March in 2017. Out of Order leaps from whimsy to sorrow, from wordplay to compassion, always with humor and hope, always with love for everything life holds.
–Ellen Aronofsky Cole, author of Notes from the Dry Country and Prognosis.