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Event Boundaries
Event Boundaries considers ways our relationships and growth as individuals are interdependent, whether it s possible to consider any relationship (including with ourselves) independent of the culture and environment it exists in; whether we create our culture and environment in part through the way we enact our relationships, to what degree reality is objective or a matter of perception, and how we come to terms with our and others mortality."
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
Published March 7, 2017
6 people want to read
About the author
April Ossmann
3 books3 followersApril Ossmann is the author of WE (Red Hen Press, April 15, 2025), and EVENT BOUNDARIES and ANXIOUS MUSIC (both from Four Way Books), and a recipient of a 2013 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, and Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award. She has published her poetry widely in journals including Colorado Review and New England Review, and in anthologies including FROM THE FISHOUSE. She has published essays including Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript (Poets & Writers, March/April 2011), and a biography/critical study of poet Lynda Hull in AMERICAN WRITERS SUPPLEMENT XXI. Former executive director of Alice James Books (2000 - 2008), she owns a poetry consulting business (www.aprilossmann.com), offering manuscript editing and publishing advice to poets. She has taught in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College, and teaches private tutorials and poetry workshops using a method she developed to teach poets to revise their work objectively. She lives in White River Junction, Vermont.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 2, 2023
Keenly observed lyric, sometimes featuring Vermont. I enjoyed how occasional moments if rhyme or rhythm could pop up in unexpected places to draw things together.
February 17, 2017
Every one of these translucent poems can be likened to an orchid—a unique specimen cultivated with rare skill, yet surpassingly fresh. Each candid word is a shimmering petal. And the networks of syntax are angelic: consummately clear.
The events presented within these pages are personal "herstory" happenings, familiar to most of us. Private or public dramas situated in Vermont and environs—territory haunted by Robert Frost and Jane Kenyon, among other master poets. To my mind, April Ossmann certainly deserves such esteemed neighbors, not only because the concerns of her poetry are shared by Kenyon and Frost—surviving a rural winter, negotiating with wildlife and villagers and romantic partners, eeking out mercy or pity from the strict contract with Death—but also because several of her poems pay direct homage to their oeuvres.
Recall the oft-quoted poem, “Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry.” According to its author Howard Nemerov, the line in question is not a fixed, finite borderline; instead, one kind of language morphs into the other by “riding a gradient invisible.” Likewise, with regard to the possibilities offered by April’s poetics, boundaries are not sharp edges; instead, they are dimensionless membranes analogous to the cosmological event horizons of black holes. Think: multiverse, multi-verse. Whenever I am probing any Ossmann poem, searching for one or more wellsprings (of sounds, turns, images, form, claims about reality), my pursuit becomes folded into the poem’s own unfolding. I approach, approach, approach … depart, depart, depart. April’s poems deflect conclusive arrival. Her craft employs involution, implication, origami, self-consuming bubbles.
Jane Kenyon had the immutable “otherwise;” April has the mutating otherwise. Robert Frost had hay fields; April has force fields. Vermont poets have sturdy apple orchards; April has immaterial auras. Auras as transitory—and marvelous—as orchids.
I highly recommend Event Boundaries.
The events presented within these pages are personal "herstory" happenings, familiar to most of us. Private or public dramas situated in Vermont and environs—territory haunted by Robert Frost and Jane Kenyon, among other master poets. To my mind, April Ossmann certainly deserves such esteemed neighbors, not only because the concerns of her poetry are shared by Kenyon and Frost—surviving a rural winter, negotiating with wildlife and villagers and romantic partners, eeking out mercy or pity from the strict contract with Death—but also because several of her poems pay direct homage to their oeuvres.
Recall the oft-quoted poem, “Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry.” According to its author Howard Nemerov, the line in question is not a fixed, finite borderline; instead, one kind of language morphs into the other by “riding a gradient invisible.” Likewise, with regard to the possibilities offered by April’s poetics, boundaries are not sharp edges; instead, they are dimensionless membranes analogous to the cosmological event horizons of black holes. Think: multiverse, multi-verse. Whenever I am probing any Ossmann poem, searching for one or more wellsprings (of sounds, turns, images, form, claims about reality), my pursuit becomes folded into the poem’s own unfolding. I approach, approach, approach … depart, depart, depart. April’s poems deflect conclusive arrival. Her craft employs involution, implication, origami, self-consuming bubbles.
Jane Kenyon had the immutable “otherwise;” April has the mutating otherwise. Robert Frost had hay fields; April has force fields. Vermont poets have sturdy apple orchards; April has immaterial auras. Auras as transitory—and marvelous—as orchids.
I highly recommend Event Boundaries.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews