paper • 52 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-884800-81-8

Anxious Music

April Ossmann

THE POINT

The point being when a star dies
the light continues for years
yet illuminates nothing here,
not the cottage edging the lakeshore,
which from this distance
is not lit, but marked, by its light;
the same way the firefly suddenly starring
my windshield illuminates neither
the dark highway or splattered window,
but only its own small deathplace.
I observe how its light
doesn’t vanish or dim immediately,
but shrinks slowly, as if receding.
My sadness for the firefly blooms larger and darker
than I can fathom, drawing the no I’d use
for human loss, but dwindling with realization
at the cry’s end. The point being
that the light lives on…
and that it disappears.

About the Author

Praise by Betsy Sholl

"In Anxious Music, language is alive—real as rain, fresh as fire, fluid and shifting as any river running over rapids and into pools. There is a fine, intelligent unease as April Ossmann turns her quick and graceful mind to the paradoxes and rich ambiguities of contemporary life. She is a poet with a clear eye for detail, a fine wit capable of negotiating between earnest desire and self-teasing. As the speaker in the poem ‘Y’ claims, her work is ‘the perpetual revision of every belief’—not so much in order to defeat certainty, as to be radically open to experience. The natural world here is richly depicted in its varying landscapes and currents. The world of human relationships is keenly observed as it approaches and avoids love’s postmodern complexities. But mostly this is a book of poems that enact a great joy and trust in language, building a deliciously slippery vessel to carry us through the deep waters of our humanity. Anxious Music is a first book of stunning accomplishment." – Betsy Sholl

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