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case sensitive
Kate Greenstreet
Ahsahta Press
ISBN: 0-916272-89-3

Reviewer: Jeannine Hall Gailey



In Kate Greenstreet´s author statement, she states that case sensitive is a collection of five chapbooks written by a single character on a road trip, who is reading a series of books and esoteric texts about women scientists, writers, and philosophers, while listening to a mystery. Curiously enough, as case sensitive unfolds, we do see the influences: the murder mystery inserting itself into the narrative, a woman scribbling hurriedly in a journal in a stream-of-consciousness style-an accumulation of quotes that starts out appearing difficult and post-modernly-academic but ends up occurring natural and holistic. It´s a map of a mind, but also of a journey-a travelogue that imitates the patterns of the personal interior. For a first book, it has an extremely broad scope and an impressive array of subject matter.

Tone is key to the book; the tone invites the reader, at once conversational and inwardly musing. Although a formidable intellect is apparent behind the pages, the author does not seem to be showing off for the audience, rather trying to build connections from place to place for herself, willingly illuminating the liminal spaces between soul and body, between life and death, between locations, between genres, and between people. The language, though it may seem complex upon first reading, is actually disarmingly direct, interested in communicating with the self, the reader, even with ghosts. Lines from "You said life:" "You said life is nothing but/ a dialogue with meaning."

The five "chapbooks"-"Great Women of Science," "[SALT,]" "Book of Love," "Where´s the Body" and "Diplomacy"-are like five long poems that continue in different form, some lilting across the page in short paragraphs, some lists of quotations. The connecting themes-men and women, soul and body, home and not-home, and the framework of the genre mystery plot-trickle through each section. For instance, in the first section, "Great Women of Science," it seems that the speaker has just left a disintegrating relationship:

It was surprisingly easy to leave. Even to keep secret the storage space and my trips to it. I take as proof of how invisible I was, the way he didn´t notice things were gone.

In the second section, the speaker recalls her childhood, the myriad calls and uses of salt-salt water that almost drowned her, her grandmother´s cooking, biblical verses concerning salt. In the third, a romantic relationship reappears, in dialog. From "The Book of Love":

I was back in the old kitchen. We were putting the dishes
away. We didn´t seem
particularly close.

‘You might have to learn how to lie without leaving the body.
Put that in your book of love.´...

...Why are we ashamed when someone hurts us?
Because it marks us, as valueless.

I can´t hear you man
you´re breaking up
I´m losing you..."

The journey the speaker is on becomes clearer; she is out to reclaim the self from a series of failed connections, relationships that disintegrate the self. "Where´s the Body" indicates the symbolism-where is the self the speaker left behind? That is integral to and behind the mystery invoked throughout the book, as displayed in the titles of the pieces in this section-"Informant," "dusting for prints," "Where´s the body?" "wearing a wire," etc. In this section, which contains more standalone pieces than other sections in the book, Greenstreet´s speaker explores some darker subject matter, as in "safe home":

postraumatic
stated that the subject
cannot lift off

heroin cocaine marijuana
further history
unknown
unresponsive
marital status
unknown...

In the last section, also the most fragmented, the speaker´s newly recovered self registers her surroundings, the wider world around her, in a new way. From "the inner landscape," in which the speaker talks about the American idea of neighbors, thinking about her own neighbors and America as a country in a way that reveals her wit and her mistrust:

Why did it matter what Valerie might think? Valerie would never meet Manuel.

On the fence?-that´s American Bittersweet. First they take your sugar, then they try to find out how much coal you have.

The last couple of pieces are prose pages that reveal some answers about the mystery, including the explanation for the ghosts the speaker refers to throughout her travels. A kind but troubled woman from the speaker´s childhood died and left the speaker a house, and the speaker returns, essentially solving the mysteries of the book-where home is, where the body is found. Can I go so far as to say that the speaker has found herself? That might be too tidy a wrap-up for the complexities of this book.

I thought the choice to include footnotes at the end of each section was useful in citing the quotations from a variety of esoteric sources; it made the task of reading them and connecting them to the poems less daunting. These quotations seem intimately connected to the speaker of the poems, as well as to the author herself; she puts a great deal of care in embedding her consciousness with sources from Heidegger to the Gospel of Thomas to biographies of Marie Curie and the history of salt. Why are these notes important? In order not to exclude the reader from the personal journey of the writer and her speaker.

Greenstreet´s narrator leads the reader on a sometimes mystifying, sometimes merry chase through a series of nuanced and intelligent discoveries. Challenging yet ultimately rewarding, plaintive and comforting at once, case sensitive celebrates the spaces between-the journey, not the answer. A satisfying, dense, ambitious first collection that attests to the author´s maturity, mindfulness, and meticulous attention to the world around her, case sensitive will leave you questioning the plotlines of the stories in the universe, investigating mysteries to be-not solved, but contemplated.

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