Sunday, February 24, 2019

Review of "Lessons in Camouflage," by Martin Ott


Review of
Lessons in Camouflage, by Martin Ott ISBN 9781936196678

Four out of five stars
 To the extent that there is one, the theme of this collection of prose deals with some of the incongruities of human activity. A short one on page 43 is about the reality that one cannot consummate a kiss while wearing a spacesuit.
 My favorite opening line appears in ”Riddle” on page 38. “A retired interrogator walks into a bar with himself and asks for bold spirits, untraceable in the lineage of favored fermentation.” Many of the poems have a military reference, yet my favorite deals with five now rarely used punctuation marks. The title is “Why I Worry My Mom is Dying, Explained  By Five Extinct Punctuation Marks.” The five are the manicule, percontation mark, pilcrow, interrobang and the virgule. Great originally of thought went into this poem.
 There are no tear-forming sections of prose in this book. Just some well-crafted and surprisingly original statements about what humans do, sometimes not so well.

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