Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman

Nominated for a Rhysling Award and five Pushcart Prizes Jennifer Clarkspoems essays and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. The Midwest Quarterly Womens Studies Quarterly Windhover Concho River Review Ecotone Nimrod and Flyway are some of the journals that have made a home for her writings. Her short story published in Fiction Fix received their Editors Choice Award and her play Fathers Not There was featured at the U.S. National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect. She lives in Kalamazoo Michigan. ​ The story is part of our American landscape: Johnny Appleseed going from field to field town to town planting his seeds redeeming the misnomered forbidden fruit. Historians have recorded the life of Johnny A real name John Chapman. But Jennifer Clark has searched the archives of the soul of this enigmatic sower of the fruit that brings tart sweetness to the mutability of autumn. In lyric poems created with that most extraordinarily difficult of approaches the plainsong Clark resurrects the man his world his benevolent eccentricity. She gives us something much more mysterious than the legend: she gives us the real. As we accompany the John Chapman we consider what it means to give without ever knowing the result. And we thank Jennifer Clark for doing the same. --Jack Ridl author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron winner of the ForeWord Reviews 2013 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award From a couple of poems I watched this book grow into the amazingly informed text it is now. Clarks research is thorough and the poems are beautiful and evocative. Its like two books in one: a book of poetry that encompasses Americas past through the vehicle of Johnny Appleseed. As he moves through the country sowing his seeds the American landscape too evolves warts and all. The lives of pioneers and settlers the displacement of Native Americans slavery the Pony Express right up to the internet. Its such an accomplishment. And the end notes are as entertaining as the poetry. lf history had been taught like this I would have come to it much earlier. ​ --Elizabeth Kerlikowske author of Dominant Hand and the chapbook Last Hula winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition