A debut collection of poems that question authority with wit and clarity

“Words lead on to words” is both provocation and method in SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE, 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?”

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.

“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?