Eileen Ivey Sirota

Out of Order Eileen Ivey Sirota

With a therapist's heart and an activist's passion, the poems in Out of Order reveal our fractured world with wit, insight, candor and outrage. We glimpse a woman's decision to have an abortion in the 1930's, a liberal's acknowledgement of her own white fragility and privilege ("my EZ pass white skin"), a speaker's memories of her late father taking her to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and how that impels her still. Sirota's poems are both political and personal, ricocheting from the election of Obama to the Women's March to the losses of aging and the gifts and disturbances of memory. She ponders the limits of monogamous love (Larger Cages, More Desire) and marks the progression from the first snow of the season to the fourth one, just days later, in "swelling stacks of dirty cocoa cups." Her collection includes all generations from the new mother holding her infant, "the scent of talc rising like yeast in new-made bread" to memories of a beloved grandmother. With a tone both intimate, knowing and hopeful, she amplifies the life and experience of a contemporary woman.