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An Alchemist at Heart is by turns spiritual and creative, meditative and active. Drawing on images of nature mingling with sacred images of religious traditions, Appelbaum has composed a suite of poems inspired by the Great Work of alchemy. The alchemical legacy, which goes back at least four thousand years, concerns a step-by-step process of integrating elements of nature—or in this case, elements of the poem—with the self. Because each alone suffers a radical incompleteness, the achievement of alchemy—and of An Alchemist at Heart—is nothing less than the healing of both.

Imbued with the spirit of the moment, the poems in Alchemist harness the power of intuition in order to reveal the providential call of reality, what Chuang Tzu called the "third unspoken thing" that binds imagination to the physical world. Here, love letters lie on park benches while the woodpecker sounds an executioner's bell, a rose becomes a koan about death, and hope closes with the first snow.

By means of visionary juxtaposition and passionate attentiveness, Appelbaum draws from the immediate environment of a life—from everyday events—to weave a fabric that is truly informed by what he knows, and, therefore, unique, a poetry no one else could have written.