$16.00
AVAILABLE IN STORES FALL 2016
A criminal released from death row hints he was guilty of murder all along, a special needs man raised on nothing but sermons attempts to explain COINTELPRO in black protests, a woman abducted and forced to raise her half-alien children remembers everything, Chinese–looking agents hired by the U.S. to overthrow China, kill Chinese soldiers outside Tiananmen Square. Tall As You Are Tall between Them is an exercise in possibility. Where many reporters shock and numb their audiences with a relentless stream of violence and insanity while skipping or inadequately addressing inconvenient questions, Christain starts with these questions, zooms in, hovers, and rewinds. The bizarre, disturbing, and uncomfortable scenarios presented in her poems are written with an earnestness that possesses just the right degree of plausibility to leave the reader asking time and time again, “What if?” At first glance, Tall As You Are Tall Between Them is otherworldly sci-fi horror. In the end, the book is too familiar. In fact, it is our very own—the underbelly and in-between of a shifting and sliding world where much meaning is found through context and brain chemistry. All the while, Christain teaches us to peel back the layers, to be fearless—“to jump towards the atom blast if [we’re] going to be forced to fall back anyway,” and to enjoy the ride.
Description
Martin Ott’s first two poetry collections won the De Novo and Sandeen Prizes. In his third collection LESSONS IN CAMOUFLAGE, he continues to explore the theme of casting a light on hidden truths. The book spans his turmoil as a U.S. Army interrogator to conflicts personal in nature: divorce, death, and determination to uncover the mysteries of what makes life worth living.
HYPE
“Martin Ott’s Lessons In Camouflage is as hard to pin down as its title suggests. It weaves in and out of formal structures and straight talk, with poems both philosophical and poems made out of tabloid headlines. Head on, these poems confront conflict at all levels – family, war, and the morning commute. And because he lives in LA you will learn more than you thought possible about dangerous drivers. Lessons In Camouflage is exactly what he speculates our first books were–“dissertations on how much trouble we were in”. And like most trouble, this is an awful lot of fun.”
–Matthew Rohrer, author of The Others
Martin Ott’s Lessons in Camouflage examines the place where masculinity and its expectations intersect. There is a lushness and musicality to Ott’s poems, which belies the idea that poems about manhood should be spartan. Moreover, Ott has a gift for pulling stories from everyday objects and for making newer, more useful objects out of them, which are these well-crafted poems.
–Sonia Greenfield, author of Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market
“In Lessons in Camouflage, Marin Ott invites readers to discover much strange beauty in mundane domesticities — graffiti in an apartment complex elevator, tedious morning commutes, people in line at Starbucks, these are among his subjects. But rather than reveling in how a clever writer can defamiliarize what we think we know, Ott’s great gift in this collection is to make the familiar seen in all its depth and complexity. This book takes readers fully and vividly into the inner life of a young military recruit, and then later, a father, and beyond that, a grieving son. We may think we know these stories, but what we think we know is mere camouflage – this book helps us see through the obfuscating veils into the clarity of a beating human heart. ”
–Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The End of Pink
Additional information
| Description | Poetry – PB |
|---|---|
| Pages | Pages – 55 |
| ISBN | ISBN: 978-1-936196-67-8 |
| LCCN | LCCN: NA |
| Available September 15 | Available Now |
