One possible scenario for this book review could go as follows: 1) old boomer guy reads poetry collection called Thumbsucker; 2) it is highly personal work, written by a millennial; 3) old boomer guy is perplexed or downright annoyed by the preoccupations of the poet; 4) He just doesn’t get it.

This review respects the first half of that scenario—but, happily, the second half does not apply. Yes, the thematic content of this volume is sometimes youthful, with references to school, break-ups, Instagram, even beer pong. There’s a character named Jason who is exotic because he’s over forty. But none of these details (and they are, in the end, only details) alter the fact that Thumbsucker is an interesting and often arresting book by an obviously talented writer.

The collection opens with “Real Art,” a poem too long to reproduce in its entirety here, but which begins:

I don’t know what you people want,
though it’s probably the exact opposite
of this poem

and it ends:

Can’t tell you how many times 
I’ve pulled out all the stops for you
just to trip over them

This sets the tone. Here and elsewhere, the speaker’s voice is uncompromising but at the same time unpretentious, even vulnerable. It tests limits but does not pretend to master consequences. 

There’s a long tradition of anti-art, of course, whose existence depends on the “real art” alluded to in the title of the poem. But even as Thumbsucker distances itself from “real art,” it makes no claims of aesthetic rebellion in any programmatic way. There is little swagger here.

Instead, the reader encounters a persona whose self is a work-in-progress; a self that is doggedly assertive and refuses to dissemble; a self that does not always know what it wants, but knows what it does not want. 

This negative knowledge includes poetry, too. Here, for instance, in “Love Poem”:

Even in college,
the entirety of canonized poetry
piled like pale yellow kernels
I pushed around my plate.

But since poetry is too important to be left to university English departments, a driven writer must press on. Giordano offers thirty-nine poems that, considered as a whole, stake out a sensibility. 

Throughout Thumbsucker, in poems like “DM Me Your Address,” “Creation Myth” and “Kneeling to St. Anthony for a Clue,” a first-person speaker figures prominently, in modes ranging from confessional to speculative, recounting hopes and humiliations, fantasies and self-doubt. Truth, such as it exists, is relentlessly personal and subjective. The gaze or mediating eye is conspicuously a mediating “I.”

Despite occasional reservations, which I’ll get to later, I was won over by this speaker. In today’s context of didactic or agenda-driven art, where a moral is often confused with moralizing, Giordano’s reluctance to preach, which in the end is a form of modesty (however immodest some of the poems’ self-revelations are), felt refreshing. 

I’m oddly reminded of George Orwell’s defense of Henry Miller. Though he was very much an agenda-driven writer, Orwell appreciated Miller as an anti-art artist and political quietist, remarking in 1940’s “Inside the Whale,” “Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions […] ‘innocent of public-spiritedness.’ No sermons, merely the subjective truth.”

Of course, Orwell is writing in a much different context—in some respects, he might as well be on another planet—but his allusion to what people “do feel” seems to apply to Thumbsucker. A poem like “DM” insists on the power of yearning (“i shudder for hours, keep shuddering around the space you leave behind”). “Alone with Everybody” captures an individual’s social awkwardness in the company of strangers (“searching/for ways around/the velvet rope of their grins”).

Moreover, not all these poems are “I”-centered. “Dudes” is a very good poem where the speaker turns the gaze elsewhere, and riffs about what academic intellectuals might call invisible normative patriarchy. But Giordano wisely avoids the leaden language of the theory-infatuated explainer, and trusts the strength of metaphor: 

you might wonder if dudes ever get bored
of themselves, picture other worlds
awash in brand-new, non-dude oceans

but to dudes,
dudes are not dudes,
and the water is water

All to the good. That said, some of the poems, to my taste, are too garrulous or sprawling as the first-person speaker gropes for a direction. “On Second Thought” even refers to “a torrent of verbal diarrhea” and I have to admit that, though harsh, this description has an occasional ring of truth, for example in poems like “Submissions Guidelines” or “Whatever.” Instead of adding breadth, the result of prolixity is dilution, undermining the artist’s efforts. 

Maybe that’s just the old boomer reviewer talking, the sort of reader that Giordano might find too fussy about form. Perhaps. But it’s worth underlining that Giordano’s allusion to the “torrent” functions as a preemptive self-critique, a distanciation from a feature of the work. 

In any event, I would also argue that some excesses are consistent with the writer’s method and do not require too much apology. As William Blake noted in Proverbs from Hell: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

Here lies the strength of Kat Giordano’s Thumbsucker. It is ready to explore what is more than enough. Not for the sake of grandstanding, or for a fashionably arty or careerist pose. This poetry does not attempt to flatter. But—and this is worth a lot, in our age of instrumentalized influencing—it grants permission to be otherwise. The speaker from “It Can’t All be Over” sums it up well and deserves the last word:

let’s take one minute,
spare a thought
for the grace
it never feels right
to talk about.

Thumbsucker is available here via Malarkey Books.