"Tell Me You’ve Earned It is a dazzling kaleidoscope of wants—of carnal desires and urgent emotional hungers—in which Giordano excavates and plunders the depths of her being to present her honest experiences on the page for us to devour in all their brilliantly chaotic glory. With devastating insights into the reality of living with borderline personality disorder, the poems in this collection oscillate between being sexy and sad, romantic and tragic, funny and shocking. We witness the poet standing on the precipice, then throwing herself off it in the name of love, and ultimately finding her feet after the crash landing. Assertive, brave, and unsparing, Tell Me You’ve Earned It is an audacious collection from a poet who dares to take risks in both her life and her art—and thank god Giordano risked it all, because reading this book felt like a delicious binge after a violent purge."
— HLR

"This is a collection about blood flowing." With this sentence, which evokes both the singularity of Plath's blood jet and the expansiveness of Sara Teasdale's "young blood flowing beyond the sea", Kat Giordano invites us along the arc of her own personal Orion: a love story that tears the bandage clean off a life and lets the flesh beneath redden & breathe. "I should have handed you these feelings before they were perfect."—Giordano’s speaker walks the knife’s edge of raw want & writerly craft with such dexterity we almost don’t notice incisiveness becoming incision, veins opening to reveal how “the heat of this new love / has boiled away all that could have / killed it”. I’ll close this blurb with some borrowed lines that do the book better justice than I could, since it’s a true “magnum opus: / an anatomical heart / with our initials / scratched deeply / into the arteries / and valves.”
—Tom Snarsky

TELL ME YOU'VE EARNED IT, a collection of poems, is the third book by Kat Giordano. Kat's other books include THE POET CONFRONTS BUKOWSKI'S GHOST (Philosophical Idiot) and THE FOUNTAIN (Thirty West Publishing).