The Last 4 Things

Kate Greenstreet

 

Reviews of the book

 

Nominated for Best Book and Best Second Book of 2009 by Coldfront Magazine.

 

“A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Kate Greenstreet read from her first book, case sensitive (Ahsahta 2006). It struck me, at the time, how much her reading style conveyed the sense of thought in real time, as opposed to language that has been permanently crystallized and is now being rehearsed. The poems, in her mouth, carried a certain elusive feeling of spontaneity. I wondered if the poems on the page felt quite so alive, and was forced to admit, upon reading them, that while they did feel alive in a way, it seemed an inescapable quandary that once locked into the page, a poem felt, well, fixed.

“Kate Greenstreet’s second book, The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta 2009), finds a loophole in this quandary by including an accompanying film, inserted into the back flap of the cover, over which Greenstreet reads poems from the book. What impresses me about the film is that it does not act as simply a vehicle for the poems (i.e., poems read against a backdrop of images), but feels very much organic to the text, as if they were created in tandem, the images growing out of text and text growing from images (to see a short excerpt from the gorgeously composed film, click here.)” —from the review by Christina Mengert at The Constant Critic

 

“Kate Greenstreet is not afraid to tell us what she sees. Her 2006 debut, case sensitive, seemed, at that moment, among the most assured and uncompromising books in recent memory, but her new work The Last 4 Things is a superlative re-examination and transcension of her own narrative preoccupations, proving that a second book can illuminate the first. For her fine, homemade metaphysics, smartly deadpan cosmology, and redemptive, lyrical humanity, Greenstreet is strictly essential reading.” —from the review by Scott Wilkerson in Word For/Word.

 

“Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things is staggeringly good. It even comes with a DVD of Greenstreet mostly reading over films. Since I've never heard her read live, the DVD was tremendously helpful. It sets the pace of her voice for the reading experience. Even without it, though, this collection plays with framing, with how much we see events. It explores memory and the borders of knowing (like the border between death and life).” —from the review by Bill Allegrezza at p-ramblings

 

“Kate Greenstreet’s The Last 4 Things is an insight into things near and far, with a camera serving in place of the narrative arc, the means by which the range of vision is captured. ‘Every contact leaves a trace’ and Greenstreet’s apprehension of the nature of seeing extols us to find fruitful recognition in the bridge between object and distance.” —from the review by Sophie Sills in Area Sneaks

 

“Of the finished product, Greenstreet herself said she ‘wanted it to have a feeling it could have come from anywhere, and [that] it was unclaimed,’ and she’s succeeded. The Last 4 Things is a beautifully slow, metered trek through shape-shifting characters and belief systems, encounters with family and strangers, and the weight of passing comments they leave behind. . . . Greenstreet has become a master at tying seemingly disconnected fragments together with a congruent tone and scope, so closely that disparity often becomes an induced empathy, and we use one moment to describe another in a string of influence. This is a book of such strong energy and space we want to be immediately consumed, but that’s just impossible. It takes time and patience to fully enter, and when you aren’t paying attention it fully engrosses you, and you have nothing left to say about it.” —from DJ Dolack's review in Coldfront

 

Can you talk about the idea of ‘fire’ as a character and a personality in the book?

I think fire predates character or personality. What’s it doing in the book? Heating things up, being set, being feared, making noise and smells–signaling violence, mortality, urgency, and maybe a level of frustration that makes a body feel like bursting into flames, destroying the container. —from DJ Dolack's interview with Kate Greenstreet in Coldfront

 

“On the first page, a single line, in italics, set apart from the other fonts and stanzas gives a sense of the spiritual, the other-worldly which poetry, at its best, and Greenstreet, at her best, is able to do:

I have had a Letter from another World...

This Letter, this World, the sparks of disconnected thoughts depicted through the poet’s phrasing, the flashes of wisdom and the structure of this first section, with its blank pages and spaces is symbolic of her trust in silence and space as a poetic device.” —from the review by Bobbie Lurie in Jacket

 

“Greenstreet is nothing if not challenging, electric and crisp.” —from the review in Publishers Weekly