LINE LEVEL #16
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses Thalia Geiger’s “Pitiful, adj.” from her forthcoming chapbook, Wild Like a Woman. Geiger is one of our own—a volunteer reader with Frontier, and we’re so proud of her! You can read some of her thoughts in her LINE LEVEL CHAT here, and pre-order her chapbook HERE.
pitiful, adj.
- evoking or deserving of pity. b. shameful and deserving of spit. c. as in, “isn’t she just”; d. as in, “you must not be talking about me”. e. the lot we got. f. often a noose we tie around our swan-like necks. g. as in: too slender, too much, too little, too late. h. seen in: being excited that lyft has a new feature to pair you with another woman driver. i. usually the thing in its entirety. j. example: me. k. example: probably you, too.
Contributor’s Note // Thalia Geiger
“Pitiful, adj.” is part of my chapbook collection, Wild Like a Woman (Finishing Line Press, 2025), which was written as a reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. This poem very much takes on some of that initial anger and spite, as the speaker uses the form as a vehicle for exploring the different facets of this label some women are unlucky enough to receive, as well as her own feelings regarding the label.
This is a hermit crab poem, and the chosen form is a definition, like you might see in a dictionary, complete with all the formal details. The rigidity of this educational, listicle form echoes the stifled emotion within it. Women are so often constrained by societal pressures, and the examples listed only say so much. Each description is quick and to the point, much like in a practical definition, leaving no room for misinterpretation.
As a result, its tone is quite abrasive throughout, and as the speaker begins to list the most “pitiful” examples, and like something serpentine, the poem turns to bite its own tail one moment, and even dares to lash out at its reader the next.
Craft Lessons from Poets of Color // Joanna Acevedo
Thalia Geiger’s “Pitiful, adj,” creates power and momentum as she engages with definition within the framework of this dictionary entry. The structural restraints allow for freedom of language, but this isn’t the only way that Geiger chooses to surprise her reader. The escalation of the entries she brings to us, from the relatively innocuous opening lines: “evoking or deserving of pity,” which feels neutral and unbiased, to the fiery lines we see just a few moments later: “…too much, too little, too late.” Geiger’s engagement with colloquialisms and her freedom to explore repetitive phrases is enhanced by the strict rules she’s created for herself, and this is the beauty of the hermit crab form, which shows us how much is possible, even when we really push ourselves into what may seem like impossible constraints. These kinds of challenges and limitations, applied in a deliberate manner, can be a push towards innovation and creativity, rather than a burden and a roadblock.
As Geiger notes, the actual language and rhythm of the poem itself are affected by the form the poem takes. The language is simple and straightforward, devoid of the flourishes and emotional outbursts that are sometimes associated with these kinds of vulnerable and deeply personal topics. The form of the poem distances the speaker from the complexities of the subject, providing a boundary that allows the speaker to engage with these concepts while still feeling in control of the situation at hand. Focusing on the form and the way it affects the tone of the poem is a kind of entry point into the emotions that the speaker wants to address but doesn’t necessarily know how to, and in this way, the form is almost a therapeutic tool, a kind of emotional crutch or a structural foundation that can be built on, a poetic safety net.
Form is one of the oldest curiosities of poetry. Since poetry predates the written word, the most obvious formal elements that come to mind when we think about form with an attention to its history must be linked to the oral traditions of civilizations like Ancient Greece. Poets like Homer built systems of language and rhythm that we study to this day. Meter, or the pattern of syllables and emphasis in a given line or poem, long defined poetry as a fundamental aspect of its construction—Dante’s Inferno is always cited for its terza rima, a form constructed of interlocking tercets, and of course, we can’t forget Shakespeare and the sonnets and all the iambic pentameter.
Form gives us a window into the poet’s goals when creating their poems and it tips us off when we consider their poetic ambition. Geiger is trying to create a distance between the emotional content of her poem by telling it to us in a recognizable form that we can all easily immediately relate to. The voice of the speaker is watered down by the dictionary entry format, and the intensity of the poem becomes accessible for the reader because it is filtered through a form that takes away some of the unknown specifics and gives us an entry point that we can easily find and use without too much difficulty. These kinds of “hermit crab” poems are especially popular as the internet age gives us all kinds of informational forms that gift poets with formats that we use every day, and poets of all kinds can piggyback on forms like dictionary entries in order to add their own twist to these familiar kinds of linguistic tools.
As an exercise, giving ourselves any kind of rule or parameter to focus on can be a fun way to explore one’s own poetic practice. Our Hermit Crab challenge in the fall challenged poets to do just this. As we keep exploring what is out there, in terms of the poetic landscape, we might be surprised in what we can learn about poetry, and even more than that, what we can learn about ourselves.
Thalia Geiger is a poetry editor and author of the chapbook Wild Like a Woman (Finishing Line Press, 2025). Her debut poetry collection, Red Death, Purple Dark, is forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing. She is the winner of Black Fox Literary’s 2025 Summer Fox Tales Contest, and her work has been featured in New York Quarterly, Allegory Ridge, Coffin Bell, Grim & Gilded and more. She hails from Philadelphia, where she works in journal publishing. You can find her on Instagram and BlueSky @thalierr.
