After an exciting and competitive reading period, we’re thrilled to announce the results of Indirect Books’ inaugural J. Alfred Prufrock Prize for Poetry, guest judged by V. Penelope Pelizzon. The grand prize winner is Susanna Schantz’s Quarter Rest With Fermata, which will be published by Indirect in March 2027, in advance of AWP. Susanna also received the cash prize of $1,000 and 25 author copies.
We received an incredibly strong group of submissions, particularly for our first year running this contest, and the poetry imprint at Indirect is off to a formidable start. Jessica and I’d like to thank our entire poetry team, lead by Director of Poetry Meghan Dahn and Poetry Editors Genevieve Schubeck and Alexandra Romero, and of course Penelope for serving as guest judge. The two Finalists were L. S. Cyning’s Viola d’Amore and Holly Thompson’s Echo[logic]a. Full results will be posted on our website.
To go along with this announcement, we thought it would be fun to have Susanna write a process essay about her manuscript, which has very cool roots in the structure of classical music. Read it below, and check out more about Quarter Rest With Fermata on our website.
Félicitations, Susanna!
Ear Training as Equipment for Living:
On Writing Quarter Rest with Fermata
The last thing I anticipated in the sixth decade of life was coming down with bad case of late-onset poetry. The tale of hows and whys, from the first life-and-death plunge into form until now, is a comedy—in the good ‘ol Aristotelian sense—even a musical. It’s a story of impossibles, of trying to secure a return ticket from a guilt trip through poems that can only aspire to live up to the music.
There was nothing usual for any of us, March 2020, but also nothing exceptional, unfortunately, about the experience of lockdown-separation from a loved one who lay dying. Well-meaning reminders that this was involuntary did little to soften the guilt for not being with my musician father, a guilt that gut-wrenched and burrowed in, making no move to relocate after his passing. If forgiveness exists only in the context of the unforgiveable, as Derrida, swinging from his high bar, would have it, perhaps a need for forgiveness that strangles you from the inside out signals that what you did¾or didn’t, couldn’t do, in my case—is indeed unforgiveable.
But my father was a cheerleader for the affordances of form. Forgiveness, he never tired of sharing, is instantiated in sound shortly before the close of Mozart’s opera Le Nozze di Figaro. Talk about the unforgiveable—a Count’s plea to his beleaguered wife after trying to assert his droit du seigneur with servant Susanna. Especially as said-servant is my namesake, my instinct is to lobby the Countess toward a swift exit stage left, but her simple yet staggering “sì,”prefiguring Molly’s, I like to imagine, is impossibly exquisite, and far be it for me to deny her, and us, the notes.
So, headphones on, I listened, over and over again to this exchange, inhaling into the agonizing space, infinitesimally short, between the asking for pardon, and the granting, the silent, anticipatory potential of the pause. One day, surprisingly, words came out on the exhale, and I set out to wrestle with them. For two years I obsessed over a single poem that was doomed from the start by trying to accomplish too much: to enter into a place of the not-me, to transmute raw experience into shaped memory; to celebrate my father’s outsized aesthetic sensibility, his heightened state of alertness; to speak to him in a private language that might still be legible to others; to make manifest an imaginary, impossible, forgiveness.
Letting go of the poem “Quarter Rest with Fermata” eventually took on a sense of urgency, and I was improbably lucky to find a home for it, the act of making it public a liberation, and, it turned out, a gateway. I began to listen widely, returning repeatedly to certain pieces as narrative, image, and arrangements of words took shape, historical and literary connections and complexities entangling, in collisions of memory and moment, with the action of sound upon the body. In short, pleasure.
I’m a sucker for Calvino’s sense that a book only resolves in another book, so it’s hard now not to read “Words lead on to words,” a line from the next manuscript I wrote, as an explanation for the unspooling of poems in consort with the notes in my ears. Forty-five pieces/poems in, however, a thorny question arose about whether to carry on. What happened next is the stuff of short story. The protagonist, with a problem to solve, goes to put something in basement storage and nearly stumbles over a box that had become dislodged from a stack. Opening it, she finds conducting scores her father hadn’t given away to former students and fellow musicians with the bulk of others, and is startled by how much language, and strictly speaking non-musical language, is written all over them. He has given me a bar for nothing, she thinks with a wry smile, a conducted measure to ready performers before the music begins. She arranges his striking phrases into a found poem—a portrait of the artist as her father—placing it after all the others, handing over the cadenza, the final flourish, to the finer poet in the family.
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Quarter Rest with Fermata is the inaugural recipient of the J. Alfred Prufrock Prize for Poetry and will be published in 2027 by Indirect Books. Susanna Schantz’s collection SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE (University of Massachusetts Press, 2027) was awarded the 2026 Juniper Literary Prize for debut collection. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Common, Abridged Magazine, Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, coastlines review: a journal of docupoetics, dadakuku, The Sam Hill! Review, La Piccioletta Barca, PHIL LIT, Sein und Werden, and elsewhere. A former teacher for New York City public schools and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, with a B.A. and M.A. in English from Yale and Columbia Universities, she lives in South Carolina.