"Through a profoundly affecting assemblage of poetry, prose, and visual art, Young Tambling expands beyond its rich source material and becomes a forceful meditation on selfhood, trauma, and memory." Hilary Plum Kenyon Review

"Provocative and unsettling in its variety, this third collection. . . nonetheless insists on the bare facts of sex and death, friendship and family, children's wishes and adults' regrets . . . Greenstreet places herself in the company of C.D. Wright and Anne Carson, whose fans might gravitate to her careful resilience." Publisher's Weekly

". . . everything about Young Tambling becomes a metaphor for how we interact with art." Holly Welker Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction

"Like Kapil's Schizophrene, the ballad of Young Tambling is composed of fragments, serving as moments of rupture, but also as moments of (and possibility for) greater connection . . . The lives that emerge in Young Tambling are often fraught with tragedy and great sadness, but they are also filled with empathy, compassion, and the transformative power of art." Megan Kaminski The Los Angeles Review Issue 16

"This is a book about people who struggle. But for all its moments of danger and catastrophe, there is a stunning and audacious story of a young girl finding her way through selfhood, to art and its many forms." DJ Dolack Coldfront's Top 40 Books of 2013

"Greenstreet is a master at expressing a marvelous interiority, a collection of quotes, images, ideas, the day's detritus, and somehow making all of this more than just a pastiche, but a whole in which the parts can be observed and analyzed, but never nailed down as to how they work their mystery." Kathleen Jesme's blog

"You can be assured of two things: First, as Greenstreet’s quote from Amiri Baraka states, 'Everything we dont [sic] understand/ is explained/ in Art.' Second, grappling with that uncertainty will leave you charged and seeking. For while this book was the most perplexing one I have read all year, it is also the only one I immediately started rereading as soon as I had finished." Scott Russell Morris The Volta Blog

"'I change the focus of my eyes, / then I can see' might be read as a poetics for this entire book that is about biography, autobiography, feminine sexuality, the stories and myths we either buy into or reject and who gets to make them—this book will not settle on one way of seeing/reading/narrating." Jill Magi Pageviews / Innervisions

"Like Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Young Tambling is less an autobiography and more an ontological exploration of biography." Matt McBride Best Thing I've Read This Month at Vouched Books

"Greenstreet makes sense of what is a story, but it's not a traditional one, it's one that is told obliquely, and by this oblique telling (with moments of direct address), it is able to reach a space in the heart that few books can." Laura Carter The Fanzine

"Part poetry, part prose, part artwork, part erasure, part interview, part ekphrasis, Young Tambling is indisputably all page-turner . . . This is a significant work by one of our very best poets." Seth Abramson Huffington Post

"For lack of a better way to put it, Greenstreet simply sounds more like a person than any other American poet I can think of. . . You have to have listened to a lot of people to reproduce the cadence and diction of actual speech as well as Greenstreet does, but she never uses her apprehension of that speech to reduce or telegraph the person speaking. She does the very opposite in that she reminds us of how cryptic, associative and random speech, memory, and even personhood can be." Ray McDaniel Constant Critic

"Read this book. It is an illumination of the traditional female all women writing in contemporary America struggle to define themselves against and within." Sarah Boyer Denver Quarterly

"The questions and images presented in the poems are so vividly connected to the country and time we are living in that it is impossible to put this book aside." Idra Novey 14 Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles at On the Seawall

"Young Tambling is a deeply complex book, structured through lyrical threads of memoir, a tightly packed musical language and a myriad of narrative directions . . . and every line, every page, is an absolute delight." rob mclennan's blog

"Kate Greenstreet's uniquely resonant voice always snags me from the first page. In her latest book, Young Tambling, an 'experimental memoir,' that voice speaks just as powerfully as it explores what it means to be: a human, an artist, an emotional being, and a memory vessel." Laura Sims My Poetry Picks for 2013 at the Poetry Foundation

"Greenstreet's ideas—particularly those about art's position in the individual and collective consciousness—are a consistent source of excitement." Benjamin Landry CutBank Literary Magazine

"Greenstreet calls attention to the ways that the residue of history, culture, and emotion obscures what meaning there is to be found in one's immediate surroundings . . . The visual elements of the book complement this exploration." Kristina Marie Darling Colorado Review

"What she tells is often fragmentary, misremembered or partially heard. This is more honest because the purpose is not beauty as we traditionally represent it but 'to learn. To represent a life.'" H.V. Cramond NewPages

"This summer I've been interested in books that mix poetry, prose, and visual art. Kate Greenstreet's Young Tambling  incorporates all three in a beautiful book that claims to not be autobiography, but about biography." Janelle DolRayne The Journal

"It's about intimate anonymity." Matthew Klane "What I'm Reading Now" at Drunken Boat

BACK TO TOP