Quarter Rest With Fermata

The winner of the debut J. Alfred Prufrock Prize for Poetry, Susanna Schantz‘s Quarter Rest With Fermata inaugurates Indirect Books’ poetry list with formal nuance and vibrant linguistic play. Informed by a life-long relationship with the structures and resonances of classical music, Quarter Rest explores the interplay between artistic media while sounding the depths of loss, memory, and love.

Selected by V. Penelope Pelizzon as the Grand Prize Winner, Quarter Rest With Fermata will be released by Indirect Books in 2027.

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, 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.