Bøker av Martin Ott

"Ott's prose crackles and sizzles. There's never a dull moment, right to the riveting end. It's the kind of novel Hemingway might have written had he been alive today." Erik Martiny, author of Night of the Long Goodbyes West is a man looking to flee the past, barely old enough to drink and looking to rediscover himself after several tours in Afghanistan as a POW prison guard. After going AWOL, West looks to reunite with Solomon, his childhood best friend, who exists in the dark underworld of a Los Angeles gentleman's club, Club Paradise. West soon finds himself caught in the web of an Iranian family and its patriarch, Big Z Pourali, a former wrestler with a dark side and side businesses that put his dancers, employees, and family in peril. West stays in LA to look after Solomon but soon falls for the club owner's daughter Nikki. West must come to terms with the raw underside of a Los Angeles crime family and his own past, all the while hoping to maintain his sanity in the process.

We encounter many voices in life: from friends and family, from media, from co-workers, from other artists. In a highly connected global world, where people and entities are electronically enmeshed, we filter these voices constantly to get to what we determine to be the truth. Taking inspiration from pop culture, politics, art, and social media, Martin Ott mines daily existence as the inspiration and driving force behind Underdays. Underdays is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other. Within many of the poems, a second voice, expressed in italic, hints at an opposing force "e;under"e; the surface, or multiple voices in conversation with his older and younger selves-his Underdays-to chart a path forward. What results is a poetic heteroglossia expressing the richness of a complex world.

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.