School 3

Instead of complaining about dead poets, I will celebrate the living ones. Courtesy of Mary Biddinger at University of Akron, we met poet and painter Kate Greenstreet last night. This is what school is for!

If you shun poetry because it seems like prose that has been broken into shorter lines, or if you shun poetry for its overwrought language, or its (sometimes) dripping emotion, or anal attention to seemingly irrelevant details, you should read Greenstreet's case sensitive (published by Ahsahta Press).

It's a fictional road trip, a rumination on great women of science (who are never named). It's about salt and its high and low attributes. It's about a break-up, a character who talks to ghosts who is journeying toward an empty house that has been willed to her. It's about eating tuna fish sandwiches in motel rooms and listening to a murder mystery on tape. All mashed up together.

She took risks, and garnered more than 300 rejections before publishing this and a chapbook. Now that's some kind of grit.