(Click on the cover image to see it larger.)

"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.'. . . Greenstreet is nothing if not challenging, electric and crisp."  - Publisher's Weekly

"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. 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. Soon you might realize that the obfuscation is a looking glass, and 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. Read the whole review here.

"Working directions through her tangents, through her contradictions, sharp and shocking, Greenstreet’s is a poetry that fills and fulfills with every subsequent reading." - rob mclennan Read the whole review here.

"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. It's like the negative space around an image, perhaps literally like the photographic negatives produced by the protagonist of The Last 4 Things, Greenstreet's new book from Ahsahta Press." - Mathew Falk, 360 Main Street. Read the whole review here.

"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. I am an avid reader of her poetry. As a reader, 'there is room for me'—always."  - Michael Burkard

"This is all strangely familiar. To use one of its own images, reading this book is like opening a folding table after closing a door. There are two kinds of hinge, we might say. You feel the grammar in your hands and your shoulders. You begin to see how the table gets you from the eggs to the window. It just stands there. Perhaps this is, as Greenstreet suggests, like a dream you sometimes have. But (and this is the thing) it is also like going for a walk or building some intricate part of a boat. It is not the place of the poet to decide.

"A poem is not a place where a decision is made and this is certainly no time to explain yourself. 'This is what went on here,' Wittgenstein taught us, 'Laugh if you can.' Greenstreet understands this, and her lines do sometimes make you laugh. But not always. She says, 'Do a dangerous thing and you’re in danger. That’s how it works.' She doesn’t tell you to live dangerously; she just tells you how it works. Or let me put it another way: she understands why you want to go to the sea but she does not know whether you will go.

"The whole issue in these pages is one of arrangement. It is about the idea that things have places, 'page after page of places,' in fact. Greenstreet puts words in these places sometimes. Sometimes not. Is a blank page also an arrangement of words? In what way is a blank page with no marks on it like a human body? Or is it like water? Suppose we had to choose: like a body or like water? Don’t just sit there, this book seems to say, let's have a look at where things go.

"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 Basbøll

"Kate Greenstreet is a courageous writer. The poems in The Last 4 Things seem to make existential dilemma manifest. There is presence-- 'One begins with so little-- collecting, sweeping. / Or seeing it, just seeing. // Months of dust'-- and a feel throughout of story, but there is no following a story. She creates a Beckett sort of other-worldly worldliness with her very clean, very certain writing. In her words, 'making art, too, / is a kind of disappearing. A bucket with holes, on purpose.'"  - John Marshall

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