What happens when a person loses hope and yet still has the urge to make a photograph or draw with a stick in the dirt? Kate Greenstreet would like you to read this book as if you had found it left behind on the empty bus seat next to you—a document not directly addressing the question “Why do we make art,” but one that notices that one does make art, despite conditions, and that one would regardless.

“This is all strangely familiar. To use one of its own images, reading this book is like opening a folding table after closing a door. There are two kinds of hinge, we might say. You feel the grammar in your hands and your shoulders. You begin to see how the table gets you from the eggs to the window. It just stands there. Perhaps this is, as Greenstreet suggests, like a dream you sometimes have. But (and this is the thing) it is also like going for a walk or building some intricate part of a boat. It is not the place of the poet to decide.

“A poem is not a place where a decision is made and this is certainly no time to explain yourself. ‘This is what went on here,’ Wittgenstein taught us, ‘Laugh if you can.’ Greenstreet understands this, and her lines do sometimes make you laugh. But not always. She says, ‘Do a dangerous thing and you’re in danger. That’s how it works.’ She doesn’t tell you to live dangerously; she just tells you how it works. Or let me put it another way: she understands why you want to go to the sea but she does not know whether you will go.

“The whole issue in these pages is one of arrangement. It is about the idea that things have places, ‘pages and pages of places,’ in fact. Greenstreet puts words in these places sometimes. Sometimes not. Is a blank page also an arrangement of words? In what way is a blank page with no marks on it like a human body? Or is it like water? Suppose we had to choose: like a body or like water? Don’t just sit there, this book seems to say, let’s have a look at where things go.

“A poem is made by composition, by putting things together, and when you read this book your hands tingle. The Last 4 Things brings craftsmanship to reverie; it turns dreaming into meaningful work. It is a serious approach to the grammar of our emotions and you do well to read it with your hands.” —Thomas Basbøll

from Ahsahta Press