case sensitive (New Series #14) (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Greenstreet's quirky, sometimes vague debut feels less like one book than like a collection of five chapbooks, each with its own set of obsessions and themes, held together by an aesthetic consciousness that prizes immediacy, sincerity and open space. Part one, "Great Women of Science," considers the appeal of independence and the contrary draw of nostalgia, for a woman setting out on her own. "[SALT]" treats its titular mineral's properties (e.g., "[on icy streets makes winter travel safe]") as jumping-off points for questions about human nature: "Can you shut the eye with something in it and continue?" The passionate "Book of Love" and its sometime sequel "Where's the Body?" read like scrambled excerpts from smart diaries mixed with bits of murder mystery: "Why are we ashamed when someone hurts us?"; "The trouble comes from keeping a secret." Each of these four named segments reaches toward, and does not quite select, its own governing metaphor for the fluidity of the poet's inner life. The fifth segment, "Diplomacy," becomes both a fragmentary whodunit and a meditation on the poet's house, as if to ask where the self really resides. If this debut hints too much and reveals too little, it also marks Greenstreet as a poet to watch. (Sept.)
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Review

A beautiful dwelling of ideas. case sensitive suggests that there need be no divide between the associative connections of poetry and the extended thinking of the essay. This is a book full of luminous footnotes, details, and attentive readings. It strings together a series of moments to create something resonate, large, and inclusive. --Juliana Spahr

A life lived at the peripheries is partially cut open into tiny chapters that are then tugged off-camera between erasure and restoration, as an unexplained house awaits its occupant on the opposite coast. This book collects that distance through which the driver-writer hears her own randomness speak, en route, with explicit acuity and fragmented instruction, as if narrated via a brain-fever collage of loving/warning mentors M. Curie, Modersohn-Becker, and L. Niedecker, for a start. Entering and underscoring these fugal compressions is the lower limit of an ongoing mystery story vernacularized through her car s CD speakers. The result is a poem intrigue of the highest order. Greenstreet has made a brilliant beginning with this first book. --Kathleen Fraser

Greenstreet's case sensitive unfolds the "begin asking" that is possibility's scaffolding, poetry's too. Resisting the order of story that "has to leave out nearly everything," she enacts, line by line, narrative's capacity for synesthesia, for alerting one neuron by touching utterly another, for multiplicity. Greenstreet notices that totality ends, and starts, and its claim is thus false. "So much we say to one another isn't true it's just the way it comes out, so we need to be forgiving." In the "spontaneous luminosity" of her materials just words Greenstreet frays a way through, to where all that stands between need and forgiveness is being's quiet insistence, simply this: "to be." --Erin Moure

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Product Details

• Paperback: 130 pages
• Publisher: Ahsahta Press (September 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0916272893
• ISBN-13: 978-0916272890
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #657,186 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)