On Kate Greenstreet's The End of Something

Zach Savich reviews Kate Greenstreet's new book, The End of Something (Ahsahta Press, 2017), for Kenyon Review. "[W]ondering about the present suggests that what we share most, when we share a secret, may be our time together," writes Savich. More:

There’s a similar curiosity about how we experience time—and the language we have for it—in many lines that look back at themselves (“There’s always that moment with people, / right? You look back . . . you can’t believe”) and in statements at once ponderous and emphatic (“How we came to exist. / How we came to be here, everywhere at once”). It’s common to say that “difficult” poetry asks a reader to participate in how a poem critiques and constructs the meaning of meaning; in Greenstreet’s work, it doesn’t feel like we need to sign up for a heady seminar but like we’re already together, traveling through a landscape (“There’s Franny’s house again,” reads one page in its entirety), stopping by places that matter:

We visited a house I used to live in.
Bright grass was growing in the rooms.
Early morning, summer.

Why have we come?

The secrets hovering in The End of Something can be stated, perhaps, because their impressions are already so particular that they feel specifically mysterious, much as “when you’re fishing and you bring up an old boot, you think: haven’t I brought this boot up before? Haven’t I gotten rid of it before?” That boot, that house, are distinct enough that you can question them. Such specifically mysterious speech has “a quality of matter overheard,” Cronk writes. This emphasis on “matter” differs, I think, from talk of the “materiality” of language; the latter places a reader in relationship to a text, with reference to its referentiality, while the former puts us in earshot of the things of the world, with reference to where we stand... 

Read the full review here.