PEOPLE OF SAN FRANCISCO

You can now purchase a copy of GHOST MACHINE BY BEN MIROV in the neighborhood in which it was written at these fine retailers:

1.) DOG EARED BOOKS
 

2.) NEEDLES AND PENS

Thank you, Breezy and that guy named Alvin or something

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.



 

GHOST MACHINE BY BEN MIROV reviewed at elimae

Jon Cone wrote a review of GHOST MACHINE in the recent issue of elimae. You can read it HERE.

Thanks, Jon Cone

((((((((((((((((PEOPLE OF TAMPA)))))))))))))))))

Dear People of Tampa,

I will be reading my poems to you via the tubes of the internet on 6/20/10.

I will look something like THIS. 

Here is the INFO.

Thanks, Autumn Widdoes and Martin Rock.

TACO WOLF BY BEN MIROV

This is probably going to be the cover of my next book.

Thanks, Joseph Reed.

GHOST MACHINE BY BEN MIROV

 














GHOST MACHINE by Ben Mirov is available, now for $8.00 (includes shipping within the US).

If you would like a review copy of GHOST MACHINE email me at benmirov@gmail.com and I will send you one for free.

You can also buy a copy from CAKETRAIN.

Places You Can Read Poem's by Ben Mirov

Here are some places where you can read recent Ben Mirov poems:

1.) JUKED #7 (thanks, John Wang & Dora Malech)

2.) AGRICULTURE READER #4 (thanks, Jeremy Schmall & Justin Taylor)

3.) WE ARE CHAMPION #2 (thanks, Gene Kwak)

4.) FLYING FISH #3 (thanks, John Greiner)

5.) LUNGFULL! #18 (thanks, Brendan Lorber & Lauren Ireland)

BEN ON BEN

Joseph Reed at CAKETRAIN made this from the text of my review of GHOST MACHINE by Ben Mirov at WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE.

Ben Mirov vs. Ben Mirov

I wrote a review of GHOST MACHINE by Ben Mirov for WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE. You can read it HERE.

Thanks, Melissa Broder

PLACES TO HANG OUT WITH ME IN APRIL

Here are some places you can come and hang out with me in the month of April:

1.) THURSDAY, APRIL 15TH, 2010: The Reading at Chrystie Street (with Sampson Starkweather)


2.) FRIDAY, ARPIL 23RD, 2010: SUPERMACHINE (with Geoffery Nutter, Lonely Christopher, Christie Ann Reynolds). 

3.) SATURDAY, APRIL 24TH, 2010: LUNGFULL! Issue 18 Release Party (w/ a bunch of people)

GHOST MACHINE is available for preorder through CAKETRAIN PRESS. So is Lucas Farrell's chapbook Bird Any Damn Kind. You can get them both for 12 bucks (which is bananas, if you ask me). Preorder both of 'em here. And check out the hype for GHOST MACHINE, 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.