SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE

<p><b>A debut collection of poems that question authority with wit and clarity</b> <br/> <br/> "Words lead on to words" is both provocation and method in <i>SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE</i>, Susanna Schantz's debut collection rooted in examining the roadside church signs near her South Carolina home. These poems are at turns humorous and polemical, a deft call-and-response, taking the lure and scold of these marquees as prompts for close reading and reinvention. From the local, she sketches a portrait of the national, offering an "orison / from the republic of readers," and asking with one illuminated placard, "what will our words be like today?" <br/> <br/> Treating church signs as a public language—communal, persuasive, sometimes backhanded—these poems expose the friction between proclamation and reception, between belonging and exclusion. They press on questions of gender and agency in faith and civic life: what role women are meant to play in the church, and what might happen if a woman were to "sail beyond this place on her / own wings and a prayer." Formally alive, Schantz's lines stretch, scatter, and rearrange across the page, their shapes mirroring a refusal to be contained by the cramped wit of the marquee. Her diction is tactile and bodily, reconnecting language to sensation: "fall[ing] to one's knees / not in surrender, but / simply to luxuriate / in the cool mud." Elsewhere, a more bristling music rises: "alphabets of tick bytes / and sacramental snaps / Climbing into our avatars / we thread our way in." The poems' bold sounds and rhythms echo the urgency of the signs themselves even as they reclaim their message. <br/> <br/> "She has seen signs, and wonders," the epigraph promises; this book delivers both. In Schantz's hands, the roadside semaphore becomes a threshold and a mirror, inviting readers to decide: When is it enough to observe, and when must we answer back?</p>