About
Karen Subach is a poet and writer with a background in medieval literature, languages, the Teaching of English to Non-Native Speakers of English, and history. She was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Oxford University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and also enjoyed summer studies at the University of Regensburg, Bavaria (D.A.A.D. Nachkriegskultur) and at the Sorbonne (Cours de Civilisation Française). She has spent extensive time in Italy and Greece. Her full-length collection, Her Breath on the Window, recently has come out with Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her chapbook, Mysteries, was a finalist in Finishing Line Press's 2008 Open Competition. Her poems and stories have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, New Letters, The North American Review, and many other journals, and she has been a resident at Yaddo, a scholar for the NEH Poets in Person series, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Writer-in-Residence at Washburn University of Topeka, and a delighted teacher for the University of Iowa's Belin-Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development. For over thirty years she was the first reader and editor of novelist Wayne Johnson's work.
Featured Work
Her Breath on the Window (Carnegie Mellon)
Subach's Her Breath on the Window reflects upon longing in its range of forms, moving in lyrical detail through history-- ancient, medieval, the Italian Renaissance, twentieth-century colonial South America; the Second World War and its Cold War Era consequences-- through the world of fantasy/mythos-- among such personae as Red Riding Hood, Procne, the biblical Saul/Paul, and a French veteran of the Second Crusade in search of his beloved warrior-friend. Through form (sonnet, sestina; villanelle), riddle, lyric, and dramatic monologue, Subach offers in this collection her own "blue perfume flask with a gold band," the "trade" of art, hard-won through what is survived. Hadrian and Antinöus, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Snow White and the prince, The Green Man and his tree, and a range of separated lovers, as well as characters about to be separated through war, death, diaspora, and family trauma are explored in their often-desperate predicaments. Among the givens of Subach's collection are the brutality of the world, the damaged body, the acknowledgment of survival as costly; and the reverence for memory as both hauntingly unsettling and salvific. These poems derive from the poet's training in literature, languages, and history and are voice- and image-driven, language-rich, largely narrative, and dense with allusion.
