87. Kate Greenstreet, case sensitive (Ahsahta Press, 2006)

Airplanes can be great places to read poetry. I love those longish stretches of time interrupted only by the passing of the drinks cart. Watery coffee in hand, I read case sensitive on Saturday morning between New York and Detroit.

Something I didn't expect: case sensitive makes me think of W.G. Sebald, especially in the sequence "[SALT]." This is, by the way, my favorite of the book's five longish sequences -- the book is like five chapbooks, was put together that way, I think Kate said at the reading.

I don't want to push this too far, but there's a mood here, a wandering feeling, along with the reflecting on the curious details of a big subject, that gradually gave me that Sebald feeling of embarking casually on what will prove to be a very important journey. All those bits pinned down with quotation marks, and those footnoted lines, put me in mind of Sebald's snapshots and clippings. Different kinds of evidence, I suppose. It occurs to me too that Sebald, like George Smiley, was also called Max.

Smiley: "'See also: secret annex.' May I see it?"

"A story has to leave out nearly everything or nobody can follow it," Kate writes in "[SALT]." That's a key. I admire the balance she strikes between what's said and what isn't. A story -- an autobiography, it seems, though I wouldn't say it's the poet's -- comes together out of the accumulation of details.

At times, it feels like the poems enable me to see something by sketching in the details around that thing, rather than the details of the thing itself. Does this make sense? This feels Sebaldian in a good way (a way I enjoy) too.

Or maybe it's the sense that what we're seeing is one particular portion of a picture -- and what we must do is inch back, little by little, to see the larger design.

"You know, sometimes a message from me may seem mixed," Kate writes at the end of case sensitive. "But do try to recall the idea that all messages join somewhere."