Greenstreet's highly original case sensitive posits a female central character who writes chapbooks that become the sections in this book. [What happens in the book I want to read?' Greenstreet asked herself. [And how would it sound?' Everything the character is reading, remembering, and dreaming turns up in what she writes, duly referenced with notes. Using natural language charged with concision and precise syntax, Greenstreet has created a memorable and lasting first collection.

"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.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"This book is as much about paying respects as it is about forging ahead—an ideal combination for a debut collection. The author adds grains of literary wisdom to accompany her own brand, which is more of the homegrown variety. She essentially christens her own canon, ranging from Osip Mandelstam to Lorine Niedecker to Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History, whom she cites often in her section appropriately titled [[Salt].' . . . It is hard to believe that such a well-researched book of poems could seem organic, but somehow this volume manages such ease. The trick is perhaps joining facts with speculation and mystery. For example, the speaker asserts in her poem, [[will smother flames]' that [You know how if you hold a magnifying glass / above a piece of paper outside, the light will burn it? / Something like that is happening to my clothes. / I used to think it was you.'" —from the review by Erica Wright in ForeWord.

"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." Erin Moure, author of Little Theaters

"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. case sensitive strings together a series of moments to create something resonate, large, and inclusive." Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone With Lungs

"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, author of il cuore: the heart

Reading tour in New York, Ithaca, Syracuse, Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and other cities

Kate Greenstreet can be found at kickingwind.com.