Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman by Jennifer Clark
Purchase the Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman
ISBN: 978-0-9600931-6-8
Cover art by Ladislav Hanka
Nominated for a Rhysling Award and five Pushcart Prizes, Jennifer Clark’s poems, essays, and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. The Midwest Quarterly, Women’s 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 Editor’s Choice Award and her play, “Father’s 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. Clark’s research is thorough, and the poems are beautiful and evocative. It’s like two books in one: a book of poetry that encompasses America’s 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. It’s 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
Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman
ISBN: 978-0-9600931-6-8
Cover art by Ladislav Hanka
Nominated for a Rhysling Award and five Pushcart Prizes, Jennifer Clark’s poems, essays, and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. The Midwest Quarterly, Women’s 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 Editor’s Choice Award and her play, “Father’s 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. Clark’s research is thorough, and the poems are beautiful and evocative. It’s like two books in one: a book of poetry that encompasses America’s 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. It’s 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
Necessary Clearings by Jennifer Clark
Cover art by John Sokol
Purchase Necessary Clearings on Amazon or Barnes and Noble
release date June 29, 2014
Author bio:
Nominated for a Rhysling Award and five Pushcart Prizes, Jennifer Clark’s poems, essays, and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. The Midwest Quarterly, Women’s 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 Editor’s Choice Award and her play, “Father’s Not There,” was featured at the U.S. National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
“A warning to the reader: you will need an oven mitt to hold this heart-searing book. Replete with vision, wit, and imagistic precision, the poems in this collection enact glacially inside the reader. They gouge out new landscapes and redefine the emotional interior. Jennifer Clark feeds us our spiritual oats in the form of a toddler, a dying friend, a bat attaching itself to the space shuttle during lift off. She makes everything she touches holy. She dips her paint brush into fire and vision creating such potent undertows, we drown and grieve with her. But wait, she seems to whisper to us in other poems, it’s time to get up and dance. She inspires us to bang pots and the lids of pans together like a child and revel in the living. Now open this book and read, become—through the power of her poems—exquisitely human again.” --John Rybicki, author of When All the World Is Old
“In Jennifer Clark’s Necessary Clearings a small girl watching smoke rings “attempts to marry the moment” by sliding one onto her finger, a young mother holding her son admits “even this moment is ending.” Everything in this collection bears witness to the disappearing world, and to Clark’s desire to stay the moment with words. Graylings, gardening neighbors, even freezers die -- “Fix her, fix, her, fix her,” prays the daughter of an ailing mother. Yet death and decaying bones share a world with blueberries and goldfinches and astral nurseries where stars are being born, even if their light will take 22 million years to reach us. Necessary Clearings takes place in the tensions between these truths. These are the poems we need while we wait it out.”
--Susan Blackwell Ramsey, author of A Mind Like This, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Purchase Necessary Clearings on Amazon or Barnes and Noble
release date June 29, 2014
Author bio:
Nominated for a Rhysling Award and five Pushcart Prizes, Jennifer Clark’s poems, essays, and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. The Midwest Quarterly, Women’s 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 Editor’s Choice Award and her play, “Father’s Not There,” was featured at the U.S. National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
“A warning to the reader: you will need an oven mitt to hold this heart-searing book. Replete with vision, wit, and imagistic precision, the poems in this collection enact glacially inside the reader. They gouge out new landscapes and redefine the emotional interior. Jennifer Clark feeds us our spiritual oats in the form of a toddler, a dying friend, a bat attaching itself to the space shuttle during lift off. She makes everything she touches holy. She dips her paint brush into fire and vision creating such potent undertows, we drown and grieve with her. But wait, she seems to whisper to us in other poems, it’s time to get up and dance. She inspires us to bang pots and the lids of pans together like a child and revel in the living. Now open this book and read, become—through the power of her poems—exquisitely human again.” --John Rybicki, author of When All the World Is Old
“In Jennifer Clark’s Necessary Clearings a small girl watching smoke rings “attempts to marry the moment” by sliding one onto her finger, a young mother holding her son admits “even this moment is ending.” Everything in this collection bears witness to the disappearing world, and to Clark’s desire to stay the moment with words. Graylings, gardening neighbors, even freezers die -- “Fix her, fix, her, fix her,” prays the daughter of an ailing mother. Yet death and decaying bones share a world with blueberries and goldfinches and astral nurseries where stars are being born, even if their light will take 22 million years to reach us. Necessary Clearings takes place in the tensions between these truths. These are the poems we need while we wait it out.”
--Susan Blackwell Ramsey, author of A Mind Like This, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
