case sensitive

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.

“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

“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

from Ahsahta Press