GHOST MACHINE
by Ben Mirov will be back in stock at Caketrain. You can preorder it now. Also you can preorder copies from me.
GHOST MACHINE hype below:
“The character, Ghost Machine, in Ben Mirov’s extraordinary poems creeps me out. It makes me feel uncomfortable, frustrated, and, at times, flat-out angry. I want to tell it to do something and be done with it. ‘Get a life,’ I say. But it never leaves me alone. Creepy’s good. Discomfort and anger are good. Feeling anything intensely in this life is good, from both sides of the grave.”
Ralph Angel, author of Exceptions and Melancholies
“The arrival of character into poetry’s stream of complexities, in this case, plenty complexity recycled for sure, is a cause for celebration when its arrival brings with it ideas, feelings, experiences and challenges filled with life-fortifying, exponentially enriching currents. Mirov’s poems sometimes seem as though they are composed with ghosts in mind, jilted zombies who eat and drink just like we do, who deadpan and mix explosive combinations to surprise and maybe, maybe let us visit what we’d miss if we weren’t invited into Mirov’s plan: I plan to be another language in the body of a deer.”
Dara Wier, author of Remnants of Hannah
“Ben Mirov is the champion of the sentence. Every sentence is perfectly carved from a cold metal machine in the BART tunnels of Oakland that loops reality. They erase what they compress. I read this book and then puke in the shower. I read this book and then bleed on the sheets. My earlobes are wet. My pants are too small. These poems are about needing to touch something that you know your hand will go through. Mirov’s poems are sick and crushing. This book marks the end of fucking around.”
Zachary Schomburg, author of Scary, No Scary
Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine was chosen by Michael Burkard as the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. At first blush, the bluntly unadorned veneer of Mirov’s poems suggests a mode of confessional domestic realism, the “I”/“Eye” who simply “can’t let go of the things I write.” Indeed, our ghost—however transitory, fugitive, adrift on a river of sulk—remains fascinated with, even enamored of, the human condition. But as these mantric poems build upon each other, layering realities sentence by sentence, the machine unravels its exotic tendrils, teasing the reader toward unprecedented perspectives on love, loss, the connective urge and the phantom desires that twist like smoke in the lungs of the living.
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I IS TO VORTICISMIf you have a blog, or write for a web or print venue and would like to write about I is to Vorticism, email to me at benmirov@gmail.com and I will send you a free copy. Or if you just want to write something on the Amazon Page, that would be great too. If you would like to buy a copy of
I is to Vortcism, it can be purchased from:
1.) me via Pay Pal.
2.) New Michigan Press
3.) Amazon.com
"A recurring character in the poetry of Ben Mirov is Ben Mirov, part charming host, part self-inflicted lab experiment in a debut dedicated to demonstrating our daily, perilous transformations. These poems are sudden, agile, heart-strong, and as wonderfully unsolvable as their analogical title. Welcome to the surgical theater. You're finally going to learn how to sleep with your eyes open."
Dobby Gibson, author of Skirmish
"These poems and parables celebrate the idea of no self, even as they sing a host of eccentric alter-egos and delightfully strange secret-identities into being. Using 'interstellar ventriloquism,' Ben Mirov is able to inhabit several worlds at once. He deftly mixes the mythic with the mundane, the literary with the cartoonish, sincerity and simulacra. The result is an impressive, often hilarious, book that truly works on many levels."
Elaine Equi, author of Click and Clone
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