poetry
Susanna Schantz
Quarter Rest With Fermata explores the action of musical sound and the traces it leaves upon the body, responding to individual compositions or powerful memories of live performance. Consumed by the high-bar of Derrida’s test of forgiveness–does it forgive the unforgivable–and the iconic request for forgiveness at the end of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, the manuscript began as a way to wrestle formally with the profound guilt and regret born of the author’s separation from her musician father as he was dying during lockdown in 2020.
Only through language did she find a return to music, resulting in a manuscript that asks us to listen as closely as did her late father did, manifesting as an extended poetic confession which pursues aural pleasure alongside vexed textual and contextual questions. The poems in Quarter Rest play with history and reality, confess to pleasures unprincipled, and consider the act of listening in an age of fracture, violence, and diffusion. While haunted by aging and loss, they defend the curation of pleasure itself, a formal liberation from our most pressing and personal doubts.
The music that swirls as inspiration and interplay spans centuries–the twelfth through the twenty-first–with works mostly in a classical idiom, but also spanning jazz, electronic, and performance art. The manuscript closes with a cadenza, a portrait of an artist constructed with phrases culled from notes on conducting scores, locating the human with the universal language of music.
Selected by V. Penelope Pelizzon as the winner of the inaugural J. Alfred Prufrock Prize for Poetry, Quarter Rest With Fermata represents a bold intervention into poetic form.
Susanna Schantz is the recipient of the 2026 Juniper Poetry Prize for her debut collection Sign Broken, Message Inside (forthcoming, University of Massachusetts Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Caveat Lector, coastlines review: a journal of docupoetics, Jerry Jazz Musician, La Piccioletta Barca, Sein und Werden, Syncopation Literary Journal, The Humanist, The Sunlight Press, VAN Magazine (Berlin), among other publications. She is a former teacher for New York City schools for pregnant, parenting and unhoused teens and young men in the justice system, TRIO Programs, and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, with degrees from Yale and Columbia Universities. A trained naturalist, she lives in South Carolina. You can find her at https://hemicraniacontinua.com/
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