Nominated for a Rhysling Award and five Pushcart Prizes, Jennifer Clark'spoems, 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
