A poetic journey through historical and fictional love and loss.

Karenmaria Subach’s Her Breath on the Window reflects upon longing in its range of forms, moving in rich lyrical detail through history and the world of fantasy/mythos. Through formal poems, riddle, and sustained lyric contemplative expression, Subach offers her own “blue perfume flask with a gold band,” the “trade” of art, hard-won through what the writer has survived. 

In these poems, Hadrian and Antinous, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Snow White and the Prince, as well as a range of separated lovers and characters divided by war, death, and family trauma are explored in their often-desperate predicaments. These poems are narratively dense, voice- and image-driven, full of passion and rage, and they draw on the poet’s training in literature, languages, and history.