The Compost Reader

Poetry October 2020 ISBN 978-1-936628-60-5 100 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

"In her first full-length collection, Karen Schubert works 'Elbows deep in compost,' sifting through that which accumulates with the passage of time, the fecund and dangerous accumulations of a life: memory, regret, joy, and loss. Schubert's fertile reflections by turns witness, correct, and renew the past, her patient gaze transforming both observer and observed. This collection runs through the events of a life like the Ohio River runs through Schubert's native terrain, and like that river 'it will arrive / with more than when it started.'"—Kimberly Johnson

grief nature

From the Book

For the Boys

The girls with clean shoes and Barbies
had rules, couldn't sleep out with us,
didn't have their lawns spoiled by
baseball in summer, football
in fall, garden hose floods for winter
skating. The boys didn't seem
to notice I was a girl, maybe short
hair and bruised knees were camouflage
enough; they welted me with dodge balls
just the same. I liked their talk, and trouble,
learned things I shouldn't know like
what happens when you pour water
on a gasoline fire, and how it is to have
your wind knocked out. Mostly the wind
was behind us as we rode our bikes
down topsoil cliffs, leaped off
swings into space. Like the boys at the pier
who taught me to fish
for bait from the bucket, calling me
Worm Woman with a bit of pride,
they raised me, found a place for me
when I had no fishing stuff of my own.
I want those boys to know
that my daughter can change her own oil,
and that I am almost never afraid.

What Others Say

In her first full-length collection, Karen Schubert works "Elbows deep in compost," sifting through that which accumulates with the passage of time, the fecund and dangerous accumulations of a life: memory, regret, joy, and loss. Schubert's fertile reflections by turns witness, correct, and renew the past, her patient gaze transforming both observer and observed. This collection runs through the events of a life like the Ohio River runs through Schubert's native terrain, and like that river "it will arrive / with more than when it started.

— Kimberly Johnson

Karen Schubert's poems begin in the moment in a particular place and time, without introductions, without commentary. But this stark present is gradually woven with reminiscence which, like compost, makes the moment yield its full possibilities. As the poem grows, the distance between writer and reader diminishes until we feel a bond with genuine intimacy.

— Carl Dennis

In the city where I come from," begins one of the poems in Karen Schubert's new book, "the cost of a thing depends on how much you have." Beware this book, then, reader: for what won't cost you more, once you've taken in all the riches to be found in these pages? The Compost Reader is a delight, where the wind plays through organ pipes strapped to the roof of a car, where kids play on baseball diamonds built on the leftovers from sawmills, where you might buy pastries called "Jesus Heels" at a roadside stand. "There should be a name for these days / when we wake in one place and sleep / in another," muses the conclusion of another poem … and if that name is found, we might employ it here as well: these poems are never content to leave us where they began. Page after page, like the seer in her title poem, Schubert seems able to spin any of the world's small details into a meaningful, unexpected truth.

— Philip Memmer

About the Author

Karen Schubert

Karen Schubert was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, and grew up mostly in Orchard Park, New York, close enough to the Buffalo Bills' stadium that if she climbed the pear tree, she could hear the rock concerts. She lived in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for twenty years, then settled in Northeast Ohio, where one line of her family has lived since the early 1800s. She is the author of Dear Youngstown (Night Ballet Press), Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press), I Left My Wings on a Chair, a Wick Poetry Center chapbook winner (Kent State Press), Bring Down the Sky (Kattywompus Press) and The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House Publications). Her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including National Poetry Review, Diode Poetry Journal, DMQ Review, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Louisville Review, Apple Valley Review, Water~Stone Review, AGNI Online, Aeolian Harp, Best American Poetry blog and American Literary Review. Her awards include the William Dickey Memorial Broadside contest winner, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in poetry, and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts and is co-founding director of Lit Youngstown, a literary arts nonprofit with programs for writers, readers and storytellers.