Synopsis

Poetry. Includes DVD. What happens when a person loses hope and yet still has the urge to make a photograph or draw with a stick in the dirt? Kate Greenstreet would like you to read this book as if you had found it left behind on the empty bus seat next to you--a document not directly addressing the question "Why do we make art," but one that notices that one does make art, despite conditions, and that one would regardless. THE LAST 4 THINGS comes with a DVD of two movies created by the author. "A poem is made by composition, by putting things together, and when you read this book your hands tingle. THE LAST 4 THINGS brings craftsmanship to reverie; it turns dreaming into meaningful work. It is a serious approach to the grammar of our emotions and you do well to read it with your hands"--Thomas Basboll.

Publishers Weekly

The austere second volume from Greenstreet (case sensitive) picks up on her other career as a photographer. Brief prose poems, spare stanzas and suggestive sequences return to such notions as frame, tint, profile and point of view: “We don't know what it means but we do know that the person disappears.// The bridge/ attracts us with its brightness.” One page can present Greenstreet as a war photographer, getting horror on film; the next can make her a victim, a dreamer, a wanderer, an examiner of linguistic particles at a very far remove. Abstractions and almost mystical hints imply lessons from Michael Palmer (“Dear When-you-stop-you-will-feel,/ Black, the color of space, mourning/ is green for rain”) or from Elizabeth Robinson. Greenstreet is nothing if not challenging, electric and crisp. Readers who find the verse and the situations in the fragment-packed first half of the volume fascinating yet hard to assemble may turn to the concluding set of prose poems, each given a date like a diary (“6 January”): here events and plots mix and dissolve (civil war, childbirth, hiking), but the hurt tone and the laconic technique make them cohere. The book includes a DVD (not seen by PW) with video art by Greenstreet. (Sept.)

Biography

Kate Greenstreet is the author of CASE SENSITIVE (Ahsahta Press, 2006), THE LAST 4 THINGS (Ahsahta, 2009), and three chapbooks, Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Statues, a Big Game Books tinyside, was available briefly in 2006. In Paradise there is no art, a boxed set of 12 cards (fragments of writing & art), was published by Flash+Card in 2007. Greenstreet's poems have appeared most recently in FENCE, JUBILAT, Court Green, Harp & Altar, Make, Hotel Amerika, Saltgrass, Columbia Poetry Review, and in a chaplet published by WinteRed Press. New work is forthcoming in the DENVER QUARTERLY, PingPong, The Laurel Review, VOLT, and Cannibal. Her poems can also be found in the anthologies Diagram.2 (New Michigan Press, 2006), The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor (No Tell Books, 2007), and Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2008). She received a Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts in 2003. Greenstreet is also a painter and graphic designer. Her blog (now resting) (kickingwind.com) includes interviews with quite a few first-book poets and some other people too. She is married and lives in New Jersey, no kids, no pool, no pets.