Sharks vs. Selfies

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Sharks vs. Selfies combines surrealist fables and personal experiences into prose poems that dart back and forth between thoughts and emotions, universal and personal truths. Political and cultural themes intersect with myths of the digital age. We find ourselves stumbling in the fog of our murky relationships even as we are more connected than ever with the blinking rectangle in our hand that is both oracle and trickster. Natural disasters loom and mirror our own conflagrations. Sharks vs. Selfies forces you onto both the road not taken and the road taken, with two feet straddling the seismic spasms of the modern world, and our efforts to maintain balance.

Martin Ott is the author of 12 books of poetry and fiction. His first book of poetry, Captive, focusing on his time as a US Army interrogator, won the De Novo Prize. His second book of poetry Underdays won the Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press. A former copywriter and communications professional, Martin has always written in a variety of genres and develops for TV and film between other writing projects. His fiction often spans literary and other genres, including Shadow Dance, Regal House Publishing, an urban noir thriller currently in development by Palm Tree Pictures. His writing has appeared in more than 20 anthologies and 300 magazines, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epoch, Harvard Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Zyzzyva. He is currently a resident of Lisbon, Portugal.

Sharks vs. Selfies is a dizzying collection of prose poems that capture in their frames the teetering life of 21 st century America, where “motion is a religion” and dreams “swipe left and right,” where the flag “waves in bad weather” somewhere above “a blood soup of empire.” There’s certainly a sense of frustration and foreboding throughout the book, but the backdrop is Los Angeles, with its Hollywood silliness and absurdity, and when Ott addresses divorce and childhood the poems are deeply moving. By the end, Ott has deftly scrambled and complicated the political, the personal, and the pop cultural, offering an honest and clear-eyed assessment of who we are in this strange and chaotic time. - Wayne Miller, author of Post-, Milkweed Editions

In this impressive collection of prose poems, Martin Ott strikes a range of tones—grim wit, lyric truth-telling, conversational dailiness, and political/environmental grief. “Today, the latest wildfire rages into form, the latest election lost in subterfuge and cages, the latest mass shooting at the borderline of fate,” he writes, demarcating the book’s territory, even as the speaker shepherds us into the intimate landscapes and holy details of his lived experience. Ott also reinvigorates archetypes via pop cultural references, from Sasquatch to Wendy’s to old school donuts to the “new world myopia” of the selfie. The prose poem form holds us firm as we journey with the speaker through heartbreak, environmental disaster, and war, and the speaker himself, the solidity of his vision and his capacity for empathy and delight, becomes a chronicler on whom we can rely and who we befriend. - Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

Sharks vs. Selfies is an endlessly surprising book of prose poems—they use parts of surrealism and pop culture to create mini fables that might guide readers through the world's chaos. With carefully controlled psychic distance, the images leave us slightly on our back foot, but wanting more. - Sean Singer, author of Discography, Yale University Press

In his new book Sharks vs. Selfies, Martin Ott is the ringmaster of the forms of declaration. But unlike the creatures under the big top, these sentences drive the show. They cause us not merely to marvel at the panoply of contemporary consumer society but to mourn the loss of family and love. “The legends passed down are burdens indeed,” writes Ott, but here with have a poet at his best amidst the mad bustle of past and present. The show will leave you astonished. - Kyle McCord, author of Sympathy from the Devil, Goldwake Press

Martin Ott’s poems sizzle. No thought is final, all things shift, are added to, accrue. Like experience, Sharks vs. Selfies builds bit by bit, and you never know where the next poem, the book will go. It’s a propulsion of continual revisions, honing ideas by repetition with variation, rounding the thought you can’t quite put a finger on, but is real and felt. In one way, it’s common, daily, this thinking, in another, it’s fantastic, deeply meaningful. It’s both. It’s important, too, to consider these thoughts, how thinking happens, how what appears turns common, and back again, so that all bets are off, and no one can get too comfortable. It’s a wild ride that I’m glad to be on. - John Gallaher, author of Brand New Spaceship, BOA Editions

Ott takes us on through today’s strange worlds where our dreams ‘swipe us left and right,’ where we are all on ‘the brink of love.’ Sharks vs. Selfies explores the genre of being human in a capitalist society unhinged by teetering empire, vast violence, and virulent vanities. Go ahead, make my day: Read this book -  Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer and Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter.