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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