case sensitive

Kate Greenstreet

Reviews of the book.

 

“The mystery of case sensitive then is not merely an enjoyably noir thriller, not merely a piecing together of cryptic clues to a puzzle, but also and more so a mystery in the ancient religious sense: a ritual journey toward revelation and recovery of the soul's secrets. Mary, the mysterious benefactor, is (or perhaps was, since she may have been murdered) a nurse. Through her gift, she functions as midwife to the process of discovery. At the end, however, we should expect not to know ‘whodunit’ but rather what it means to pursue such a quest.” —from the review by Susan Settlemyre Williams in Blackbird (read the entire review here).

 

“From the outset, Kate Greenstreet is serious about playing with language. In this whimsical, intense, and completely original first book of poems, Greenstreet brings together five loosely connected sections under the title case sensitive—and leaves it to the reader to decode just what ‘case’ it is the poet is presenting. Is it a mystery case? A medical case? A court case? A pencil case? Or upper and lower case? The answer is yes. And more. In the hands of Greenstreet, language, in all its doubleness and deceptiveness, is activated. This book is just plain fun to read, with its fusing of dreams, mystery plots, journeys, and quotations from all sorts of sources.” —from the review by Kathleen Jesme in Pleiades.

 

“When a poet disabuses herself of the notion of communal meaning in language, of truth in words, of any frame other than the indeterminable graph of circumstance . . . a new, wet, lizard-headed alien of a thing emerges. Sometimes the alien is too tongue-tied for comprehension. Sometimes the alien does as it pleases, spoiled and snobby. Sometimes the alien is sort of boring. Sometimes the alien, unfortunately, sounds like other things. But then sometimes the alien is so wonderfully weird, that you re-read its syntax, flip to its footnotes for another morsel, and gallop through a stretch of text.

“I read and reviewed Kate Greenstreet’s earlier book, a chapbook called Learning the Language. (There is some repeated material and I would argue that the chapbook serves as a kind of study for the new one.) I have a lot of the same impressions of case sensitive (part of Ahsahta’s New Series) as I had with the first. Greenstreet is consistent in her project with language. And she is genuinely interested in furthering the cause of words, or art made from words. It’s almost like she’s a home-builder; these poems are little spots in which to lounge, take a nap, have a look-see. And it feels normal, as in her chapbook, to miss or disregard something—and to return later to a changed room, one that suddenly suits you better.” —from the review by Olivia Cronk on Bookslut (read the entire review here).

 

“case sensitive appropriates mystery novel jargon that circumscribes much of the collection around a complicated absence; its identity hinted at by the line, ‘Trouble comes from keeping a secret, after the time’s passed. / We have determined it’s not about hunger. There is no body’ (77). The implication of an absent body is but a continuation of epiphanies as Greenstreet mounts theme upon theme, many transported from her chapbook, Learning the Language (along with specific poems) . . . . case sensitive expands the previous thematic preoccupations and adds subjects such as miscommunication, mystery, necessary loss, familial relationships, ontology, mining, memory and evolution . . . .

“case sensitive shifts between perplexing opacity and sharp clarity that originates from its highly elusive fragmentary method: brief end-stopped lines, the aforementioned periodic footnoting, accretive structure and its autobiographical content. Nevertheless, my perplexity is not aversion. What the book’s method beautifully exhibits is Greenstreet’s practice. She states, ‘My writing process is a combination of listening and speaking while moving text around until I hear what I’m listening for. Since breath is, for me, a poem’s primary vehicle, text and body, are inseparable’ (http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/09/kategreenstreet-paints-and-writes.html). She has also stated that one of her main purposes in writing poetry is to communicate. The dialogic desire and its fragmentary representation are an essential part of her technique, though the difficulties this combination forms result in various degrees of opacity and lucidity that alternately accept, reject and bewilder a reader. As Greenstreet states, ‘I’d say that making a poem is a way to share a secret without telling it’ (http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/09/kategreenstreet-paints-and-writes.html).” —from the review by James Bellflower in Xantippe.

 

“Part detective, all artist, Greenstreet is out and in the world, and like the poets she refers to (Lorine Niedicker, Fanny Howe), she is surgical in her view, slicing specimens, crafting hybrid images and tossing herself, her perspective into foreign landscapes (or making the familiar foreign):

Ice, it gets under your feet
You don’t know it’s there.
I was thinking of Keats, Beaudelaire.
I was thinking of boys.

“Nothing is taken for granted but instability and inquiry . . . . Never mind that we are told in the beginning to ‘imagine a movie in which every five minutes there’s a still,’ and no matter that we get ‘I was visiting my mother in jail and ran into Perry Mason in the hall . . . .’ I want to believe this is real.” —from Sina Queryas’s blog “Lemon Hound” (read the entire review here).

 

“This book is as much about paying respects as it is about forging ahead—an ideal combination for a debut collection. The author adds grains of literary wisdom to accompany her own brand, which is more of the homegrown variety. She essentially christens her own canon, ranging from Osip Mandelstam to Lorine Niedecker to Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History, whom she cites often in her section appropriately titled ‘[Salt].’ . . . It is hard to believe that such a well-researched book of poems could seem organic, but somehow this volume manages such ease. The trick is perhaps joining facts with speculation and mystery. For example, the speaker asserts in her poem, ‘[will smother flames]’ that ‘You know how if you hold a magnifying glass / above a piece of paper outside, the light will burn it? / Something like that is happening to my clothes. / I used to think it was you.’” —from the review by Erica Wright in ForeWord (read the entire review here).

 

“It’s difficult not to come away pleased with the rhythmic pleasures of these poems, to admire Greenstreet’s dexterity with pacing and narrative. However, what makes them most remarkable is the sensation that the reader is not only overhearing these words, but is also herself in the midst of the work, encountering the same voices, the same questions. The effect is at once personal and casual, as if, she should continue reading, without too much effort. “The words just came,’ Greenstreet writes in another poem, and that’s just how the reader feels—these poems simply arrived.” —from the review by Juliet Patterson in The Drunken Boat (read the entire review here).

 

“Something I didn’t expect: case sensitive makes me think of W.G. Sebald, especially in the sequence ‘[Salt].’ This is, by the way, my favorite of the book’s five longish sequences—the book is like five chapbooks, was put together that way, I think Kate said at the reading. I don’t want to push this too far, but there’s a mood here, a wandering feeling, along with the reflecting on the curious details of a big subject, that gradually gave me that Sebald feeling of embarking casually on what will prove to be a very important journey. All those bits pinned down with quotation marks, and those footnoted lines, put me in mind of Sebald’s snapshots and clippings. Different kinds of evidence, I suppose.” —from Matthew Thorburn’s weblog “Now Then: The Year of 100 Books of Poems.”

 

“When we start thinking about thinking in case sensitive, metaphor creeps in. A house is a house and perhaps a world, and ‘Why is the house empty anyway? / No one thinks of it.’ (39)

“Thinking brings the past into the present, this is how memory works, ‘I used to think it was you.’ (42) We think about how we are, how we feel, ‘I’m thinking how she also loved the air, / crushed ice, / the wooden walkway.’ (52) Thought is like prayer, lending possibility to existence and desire.

As it fell, I thought / prayed.
Maybe it won’t break.

Loss of voice. Shattered glass
in our cuffs.

The river cracked. Time
isn’t where it was.

‘He’s losing his frets.’ ‘I don't exist yet!’
He’s losing the facts. (54)

“Sometimes in case sensitive, thinking is present even without the words, as it becomes the connective tissue between things, between us, our desires, our saints; between sight and language, hands and words, letters and space.” —from Charles Alexander’s blog post, “Thinking case sensitive,” here.

 

“Kate’s book came out in September of last year but I have no hesitation in nominating her book, and Eugene [Ostashevsky]’s, as the two absolute must-reads of 2007. Search the blog, people, I don’t say that very often. I mean, seriously, buy these books . . . .

“Kate’s sustained performance—the poems in case are part of a continuous chain, though they can be read separately—is really in the same part of the poetry Hilbert space as Anne [Carson]’s Decreation . . . .It is this unity of approach—this is not a volume thrown together over a number years as the author passes through enthusiasms—that really pushes this work into a new realm. Kate is not really interested in the alchemy of the word, she is not a coiner, or even a joiner, there is no syntatical modernity here . . . . Instead the work here is patient, plain—late Yeats and not Joyce, in other words—concerned with direct communication. . . .

“There is an art—a plannedness and a fastidiousness and an artifice—here underlying the simplicity. I think that’s something a lot of contemporary poets have really lost track of—fireworks and ingenuity are wonderful things, but if I had to diagnose a contemporary malady it would be in the overuse of this lyric mode . . . . There’s a lot more to be said about Kate’s work here, but if there was something I could emphasize, it would be in the immense readability of her work: this really is a work that draws the reader along.” —from Simon DeDeo’s Rhubarb is Susan weblog.

 

“[W]hile Greenstreet has a densely conjugated sense of humor, we are, delightfully, left to wonder how much of her prior commitment to irony she surrenders in declaring: ‘So much of what we say to one another isn’t true—it’s just the way it comes out,/so we need to be forgiving.’ That she negotiates so fiercely under arc of that forgiveness is evidence of not only her essential, gentle humanity but also her intellectual fearlessness, for every idea in this book is pressed against the possibility of collapse and retrieved, at considerable risk to the poet, from the ontological lost-and-found of failure.

“Greenstreet’s larger achievement, however, is her interrogation of moments between epiphanies, her generously imaginative reading of the grim accretions of non sequitur obscuring the horizon, her honest and strict perplexity before an unresolved tension. To be sure, the first modulation toward a case sensitivity permits some lyric improvisation with ghosts in the arabesques of a dreamed certainty, but she demonstrates that the final trajectory will be toward a poetry of speculative intorsion, the transformative properties of the page, and ‘the wet ink/at the heart of faith.’” —from Scott Wilkerson’s review in Word for/Word #11, Winter 2007 (read the entire review here).