2022 Chapbook Contest Winner: Hit or Miss Yields

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the 2022 chapbook contest. This year's winning chapbook is Hit or Miss Yields by Erika Saunders! Congratulations, Erika!

The winning chapbook, along with both the spring and fall Pasque Petals, are included in a yearly poetry society membership. So if your membership is up-to-date, you will receive Erika’s book in the mail with the fall Pasque Petals!

Comment from Sara Henning regarding Erika Saunders’s chapbook:

“Each soul is a wildernessfirst colonizedby cattails and sandbarwillows”

the speaker of Hit or Miss Yields tells us.

This chapbook reads like a gratitude journal made extraordinary by the speaker’s exacting gaze:

“Cream bellied eyasblink through the beetledpine needles.”

The rich wonder of the prairie reaches fever pitch in each poem’s music:

“a sunset of lavender lacesthe water’s surface where rainbowtrout rise”

-- And the poems quiver like this long after in a reader’s memory.

Written in the proud tradition of Great Plains poets like Ted Kooser and Lee Ann Roripaugh, these poems lift from the page into miracle:

“when the flames dieto maudlin embers and we've grownchilled and tired of swatting mosquitos,we'll strip (sauna house sweatthen dive into the gasping lake."

-- Sara Henning, author of View From True North and Terra Incognita

For the 2022 contest, Carolyn Prentice is the contest manager, and Sara Henning judged the submissions.