GHOST MACHINE HYPE:

Here are some nice things people have said about GHOST MACHINE. You can still buy GHOST MACHINE from me, or from Caketrain Press (BTW Caketrain is offering a great deal right now: any two single-author titles (Cure All, afterpastures, Ghost Machine, Bird Any Damn Kind, Check-In) can be bundled together for just $12 with free US shipping!).

"What makes this book so formidable & exultant is the ease in which Mirov’s poems remain on the page while simultaneously entering the back door of our brains & then furiously begins tunneling towards our hearts. Exercise. Take your vitamins. Heart attacks are imminent for some." - Steven Karl (from No Tell Motel)

"Just as the solar king-among-planets Jupiter has a permanent storm that perpetually burns, Ben Mirov's GHOST MACHINE will glow like a fireball among the other books on your shelf. Mirov's poems are a hot gust at a time when poets seem to be purposefully ushering the rest of the conscious population out of it's preciously locked kingdom. This book will lift you by the shirt, slap you twice, and spit water in your face. Thank god." - Ben Fama (from Goodreads) 

"The Native American tribes of Northern California wouldn't settle in San Francisco, because they felt it was haunted. Mirov captures the city's empty electricity and undercurrent of existential dread through paratactics, a shifting "I" and plenty of whitespace. May you be lucky enough to never get struck lonely in that town. This book made me quiet." - Melissa Broder (from Goodreads)

"I always tell people that I want a poem to start, to grab you by the shirt on the subway & talk directly into your face without stopping & then, sort of inexplicably & without warning, let go & walk away.  That compelling urgency.  That rush.  Your poems do that so so well.  Also, the sense that the world is strange & we are estranged from the world while still notating the world we all live in.  What I mean is that there is a lot of poetry happening right now (you see it at LIT as I do at H_NGM_N) that doesn't seem to be written by people who live in the world I live in.  These poems make wry comments about having lobster claws in their noses while they walk through the forest made out of old car tires or something.  What I love is that you're able to combine a willful process of estrangement with the real heartbreak of living as a person in that estranged world.  You're not part of the estrangement, in short - you're the translator or the witness." - Nate Pritts (from an email correspondence)

"The spirit can move from body to body, poem to poem, line to line. Everything is moving, existence a river. Echoes are heard throughout. Lines are given a variant drift. One thinks one hasn't read a poem, only to discover one has. The context shifts. The pressure is urban, like New Wave French cinema. These poems seek love, that great vast emptiness. These poems seek an impossible authority." - Jon Cone (excerpted from a review at elimae)

Thanks, Steven, Melissa, Ben, Nate and Jon.