Kate Greenstreet - case sensitive

case sensitive
Kate Greenstreet



accessory


How many times can you bang one small body,
he said, and have it not
be a form of torture.

Up a lot last night—waiting for the pain
to move. With the now discredited
fever, “traveling fever.”

When you notice that huge
parts of your
life

are missing. I made it out of what it looks like.
Ivory black, lamp black, mars
black, words from a book.

He’s gone to Rome, it’s his favorite city.
I call it “my black velvet”—that
day. That night, or day.


Several books came out last year that I’ve had a difficult time getting through, not because I don’t like them, I do, but simply because they are so long. Kate Greenstreet’s case sensitive is a good example (another is Richard Meier’s excellent Shelly Gave Jane a Guitar, but there are several). I like this book quite a bit, and the above poem tremendously. But as the book is 118 pages long, I have this terrible tendency to browse when I should be reading. I’m sure this is my failing (I also like poetry readings when they’re fairly short.), and others might talk about the wonderful experience of really sitting with a book when it’s long, but my feeling is that the longer the book, the more the individual poems can get lost in the blur. I would have preferred that this book were two books, as I like to read poems slowly and many times. I would have purchased both.

None of this diminishes what Greenstreet is able to accomplish here, in this poem and book. The tightness of the fragments. The lyrical smoothness above the disquieting possibilities . . .