Underdays (Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry)

"In Martin Ott's new book of poems, Underdays, there's nature, children, desire, war, and Los Angeles, but everything is shrouded with the speaker's experiences as an interrogator in the military-an institution that leaves nothing untouched, even Ott's haunting and dark poetry. But more importantly, Ott's poetry is sonically beautiful and written with such a skilled hand-a hand that was meant to write the poetry of a gifted and haunted soul." -Victoria Chang, author of The Boss.

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 "under" 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.