Martin Ott

PRAISE FOR FAKE NEWS POEMS  

William Carlos Williams famously wrote that ‘it is difficult to get the news from poems’ but poets like Martin Ott keep proving the limits of Williams’ vision. In his wildly strange Fake News Poems, Ott chronicles the first year of the Age of Trump through a series of stranger-than-fiction poetic news stories, each of which come to speak to the wider apocalyptic rumblings of a society–and a planet–seeming to come apart at the seams. As we run toward the singularity, sex robots, edited embryos, self-driving cars, spying dolls redefine the Anthropocene, but don’t stop us from swaddling guns, or cockroaches from sneaking into brains, or woodpeckers from cracking our car mirrors. We haven’t yet seen what we’ve become. We need poets like Ott to pay attention to the way in which the future is staring us in the face, and waiting for us to wake up.”

- Philip Metres, Author of Sand Opera

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Check out my new short story Election of the Fittest in Another Chicago Magazine. 

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Martin Ott is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction. His first two poetry collections won the De Novo and Sandeen Prizes. His work has appeared in more than 300 magazines and 20 anthologies. A former US Army interrogator and longtime LA resident, Ott works as a communications professional and develops for TV and film in between other writing projects.