Young Tambling

Author: Kate Greenstreet

Publisher: Ahsahta Press (2013)

Young Tambling resonates with Greenstreet's relentless exploration of what it means to be human, to need to feel, to make art. Memory, in this book of "experimental memoir," works something like the narrative tactics of a traditional ballad—"alternate leaping and lingering," in one formulation. Greenstreet does not dabble in teleological platitudes: the lives crosscutting these poems are not singular but plural and sublime, full of sacrifice and empathy for the lost. In Young Tambling, a life's meaning is born of its poet's song, and a memory cannot reveal its truth until it finds its ballad.

"For her fine, homemade metaphysics, smartly deadpan cosmology, and redemptive, lyrical humanity, Greenstreet is strictly essential reading."

–Scott Wilkerson