How Like Foreign Objects

“Alexis Orgera’s poems perpetually, vitally involve the re-conceiving and reenacting of the means of intimacy even as they say again and again, I can no longer be myself.  These are love poems between strangers who may for a moment celebrate and endure recognition; their voice is arch, angelic and at odds with itself, mercurial in its metaphoric riches, captivating in improvisational zeal, beautiful, and impossible not to love.” —Dean Young

“Like foreign objects, Orgera’s poems cannot be easily pinned down: they retort, morph, disarm and shimmy, arcing through us like searchlights, as they illumine both fissures in language and in bodies.” —Simone Muench

“How Like Foreign Objects is delightfully hard to categorize. It often seems to be a study in contradictions. Simultaneously funny and somber, direct and obscure, this collection contains many surprises. Orgera is somewhere between Dean Young and Jennifer Knox in temperament and style, combining Young’s playfulness with Knox’s sardonic irreverence.“ Ploughshares, [read full review here]

“In Alexis Orgera’s stunning debut collection, the most commonplace items…become a point of entry to compelling philosophical questions: How do we derive meaning from experience?  Why do we construct elaborate narratives in order to make sense of the chaos that surrounds us?  Is there beauty to be found in disorder, pandemonium?” —Drunken Boat

“This is how we fall in love, Orgera and her reader, the crafting of her language putting notes in our hair, making noise beautiful, pairing us with her as she pairs everyday objects with unexpected movement. The foreign object is both our reading and her language, each a new substance in a complex game.” —Pank Magazine

“I lunge for these poems as they scuttle past, oh the beauty in movement, here then there, then zoom down the hill like a wicked cyclist, because whether I dig each poem or not, these poems are happening, something is changing, someone is loving, hurting, shuffling and this book reminds me: WE JUST NEED TO TRY.” —Vouched Books