A Place Made Strange: Kate Greenstreet's The End of Something

Kate Greenstreet's The End of Something (Ahsahta Press, 2017) is reviewed by Kylan Rice for the Carolina Quarterly. After praising the peopled quality of Greenstreet's readings, Rice notes that "[o]n the page, too, Greenstreet’s poems have their hands in their pockets." An excerpt:

...You can’t tell if they’re clutching something—a memento, or car keys, a cigarette—or if they’re just trying to keep warm. Something is being held back, but you’re not sure what. Frankly, the poems aren’t sure either. Too much time has passed, and they have tried too hard to forget. Receipts, small change. Maybe that’s a definition for repression. After a while there is dust everywhere. Greenstreet described her most recent book, The End of Something, the final installment in a quartet, as “a fourth corner defines a formerly open-ended space.” Taken together, her books comprise a space, a lived-in place, made strange by the palimpsest of memories and selves and unspeakable forgotten traumas that flare across it like overhead transparencies across a projector. It’s still a place you live in, but everything is the same.

So many miniature David Lynch films (or maybe late Jean-Luc Godard is the better comparison), each poem by Greenstreet is a shard of a story, a noir reflection on narration, populated with “the silhouetted shapes of people / and animals.” There is a TV on somewhere. There are “people who are Mike, people who know Mike, and people who just met Mike.” These people come home, feel the desire to go out and walk. Half-dreamt, half-remembered, the series of vignettes and internal dialogues that make up Greenstreet’s new book reproduce the half-perceived uncanny moments that lace the commonplace:

I was drinking my milk
and there was a little tooth
in it and I thought: What’s that?
Is that a little tooth?

I felt around in my mouth, but it wasn’t mine. It was
tiny. And I thought: he’s murdering the innocents.

The innocence? It’s a dream I’m having.

Shh…I can help you. If you’ve done wrong.
My bed is right here. Let’s lie down.

The End of Something is, like the books that came before it in her quartet (including Case Sensitive, The Last Four Things, andYoung Tambling), a detective novel. Something important has been stolen, or lost, or maybe just misplaced. Something bad has happened, but the private eye—the lyric “I,” the shifty, shifting speaker of these poems—isn’t sure exactly what. What is left is an impression, an outline. A dark skyline at night. The shape of an event. The generic Event.

Read more about Greenstreet's newest book here.