<   The Last 4 Things  REVIEWS

"Challenging, electric, and crisp." Publisher's Weekly

 

"For her fine, homemade metaphysics, smartly deadpan cosmology, and redemptive, lyrical humanity, Greenstreet is strictly essential reading." Scott Wilkerson Word For/Word

 

"How does her poetry manage so much in such a compact space, turning out as many directions, almost, as there are words? . . . a poetry that fills and fulfills with every subsequent reading." rob mclennan's blog

 

"The Last 4 Things is staggeringly good. . . Since I've never heard her read live, the DVD was tremendously helpful." Bill Allegrezza p-ramblings

 

"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." Christina Mengert Constant Critic

 

"Kate Greenstreet is a Cézanne among poets, intuiting brilliantly where bare canvas—silence, restraint—says more than paint." Djelloul Marbrook Galatea Resurrects

 

"In the title poem of her haunting second book, Greenstreet is both nostalgic for and irreverent toward the past: 'Listen, keep in touch, I know you won't.' . . . Returns, departures, and journeys interweave dizzyingly, as if to suggest you can neither go forward nor back, only roam through a limbo-like space where living happens." Sara Femenella Boston Review

 

"The Last 4 Things brings craftsmanship to reverie; it turns dreaming into meaningful work." Thomas Basbøll

 

"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. . . Her method accomplishes unity, writing as an intellectual identification with the natural world. This compulsion for documentation unlocks the lens." Sophie Sills Area Sneaks

 

"Kate Greenstreet's deeply elegiac book The Last 4 Things is an expansive meditation on a life's moments and memories flashing before one's eyes, but very slowly, each one lingering." Dan Magers NewPages

 

"Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things connects the dots and accepts the multiplicity, the many other ways the dots could have been connected." Kristen Orser Galatea Resurrects

 

 

 

 

"Spare, stark, and relentlessly intelligent. . . She's living proof that poets are not, in fact, afraid of voicing hard-won, bittersweet truths." 10 Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now Huffington Post

 

"One thing (there are many) Kate Greenstreet is good at is timing. Her phrases dart and meander in bursts of verbiage, intermittently interrupted by blank pages. The white space around the words is analogous to the silence that surrounds and supports a riff by Miles Davis or the cave that allows Echo's sighs to freely ring." Mathew Falk 360 Main Street

 

"American poet Kate Greenstreet's combination of printed text and digital videos calls into question the identity of poetry and, more broadly, the tradition of literature and memory-making practices. The Last 4 Things (2009) reveals how technologies of memory, from writing to photography to film, change the way we record, retrieve, and remediate memories." Rachael Sullivan Textual Overtures

 

"She tells us how things are, and her voicings are placed exquisitely to do so." Laura Carter

 

"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." Bobbie Lurie Jacket

 

"It's like being in a meteor shower—a streak burns in the sky, and another, and sometimes a hot rock breaks through the roof of the house." Maggie Schwed Blackbird

 

"A few pages in, you might find yourself, as I did, unable to turn away from the blitz of images, light and splotches of language butting up against each other in terribly uncomfortable but somehow familiar ways. . . What ties the collection together is a deeply-rooted uncertainty—one we can neither faithfully describe, nor escape. And when our narrator is as good as Kate Greenstreet, we want to devote ourselves to the exploration." DJ Dolack Coldfront

 

"She creates a Beckett sort of other-worldly worldliness with her very clean, very certain writing." John Marshall

 

"Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things is a remarkable book, following her remarkable case sensitive. Her poems are original and openly open. Her tempo and sense of tone are acute. As a reader, 'there is room for me'—always." Michael Burkard

 

 

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"Challenging, electric, and crisp." Publisher's Weekly

 

"For her fine, homemade metaphysics, smartly deadpan cosmology, and redemptive, lyrical humanity, Greenstreet is strictly essential reading." Scott Wilkerson Word For/Word

 

"Spare, stark, and relentlessly intelligent. . . She's living proof that poets are not, in fact, afraid of voicing hard-won, bittersweet truths." 10 Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now Huffington Post

 

"One thing (there are many) Kate Greenstreet is good at is timing. Her phrases dart and meander in bursts of verbiage, intermittently interrupted by blank pages. The white space around the words is analogous to the silence that surrounds and supports a riff by Miles Davis or the cave that allows Echo's sighs to freely ring." Mathew Falk 360 Main Street

 

"The Last 4 Things is staggeringly good. . . Since I've never heard her read live, the DVD was tremendously helpful." Bill Allegrezza p-ramblings

 

"American poet Kate Greenstreet's combination of printed text and digital videos calls into question the identity of poetry and, more broadly, the tradition of literature and memory-making practices. The Last 4 Things (2009) reveals how technologies of memory, from writing to photography to film, change the way we record, retrieve, and remediate memories." Rachael Sullivan Textual Overtures

 

"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." Christina Mengert Constant Critic

 

"Kate Greenstreet is a Cézanne among poets, intuiting brilliantly where bare canvas—silence, restraint—says more than paint." Djelloul Marbrook Galatea Resurrects

 

"In the title poem of her haunting second book, Greenstreet is both nostalgic for and irreverent toward the past: 'Listen, keep in touch, I know you won't.' . . . Returns, departures, and journeys interweave dizzyingly, as if to suggest you can neither go forward nor back, only roam through a limbo-like space where living happens." Sara Femenella Boston Review

 

"A few pages in, you might find yourself, as I did, unable to turn away from the blitz of images, light and splotches of language butting up against each other in terribly uncomfortable but somehow familiar ways. . . What ties the collection together is a deeply-rooted uncertainty—one we can neither faithfully describe, nor escape. And when our narrator is as good as Kate Greenstreet, we want to devote ourselves to the exploration." DJ Dolack Coldfront

 

"The Last 4 Things brings craftsmanship to reverie; it turns dreaming into meaningful work." Thomas Basbøll

 

"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. . . Her method accomplishes unity, writing as an intellectual identification with the natural world. This compulsion for documentation unlocks the lens." Sophie Sills Area Sneaks

 

"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." Bobbie Lurie Jacket

 

"It's like being in a meteor shower—a streak burns in the sky, and another, and sometimes a hot rock breaks through the roof of the house." Maggie Schwed Blackbird

 

"She creates a Beckett sort of other-worldly worldliness with her very clean, very certain writing." John Marshall

 

"Kate Greenstreet's deeply elegiac book The Last 4 Things is an expansive meditation on a life's moments and memories flashing before one's eyes, but very slowly, each one lingering." Dan Magers NewPages

 

"Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things is a remarkable book, following her remarkable case sensitive. Her poems are original and openly open. Her tempo and sense of tone are acute. As a reader, 'there is room for me'—always." Michael Burkard

 

"Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things connects the dots and accepts the multiplicity, the many other ways the dots could have been connected." Kristen Orser Galatea Resurrects

 

"She tells us how things are, and her voicings are placed exquisitely to do so." Laura Carter

 

 

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