Prayer’s Prairie By Jan Wiezorek

Prayer’s Prairie

By Jan Wiezorek

Wiezorek is a contributing writer for PAN-O-PLY, and this is his first poetry chapbook. Prayer’s Prairie won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press 2025 poetry contest. Contest judge Tanya Muzumdar writes: “Artfully composed and immersive, set among fires and grasses from the Great Lakes to the Northern Plains, these poems revere the prairie-scape and the complexities of lives and deaths on its soils. Its people show a compassion that still ‘salves, still stings.’ Prayer’s Prairie digs into a terrain and its people, past and present, to upturn and preserve artifacts of the mind.”

Poet Elizabeth Kerlikowske writes: “Prairies are no longer underappreciated. Jan Wiezorek’s poems explore big history and family history, adding depth and texture to these flat lands . . . . From putting out a fire in the first poem to the communion of the last, his writing speaks with the prairie’s intense quiet voice.”

Available at Glendora Bookshop, 110 E. Front St., Buchanan, Michigan.