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Ghost Machine
This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.
110 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
March 4, 2011
This poetry collection got great reviews, and I was very eager to read it. Reading it, though, was, for me, a reminder that my grasp of poetry may sometimes be lacking. The poems were so abstract that I finished them without getting much from them, even after rereading. Not that I'm doubting their content, just pointing out that they are so abstract that I wasn't able to assemble their threads into a tapestry I could grasp. Perhaps some of you, my poet friends, can read this and tell me what I'm missing. Because I definitely feel like I'm missing something. Please pardon my ignorance. Or better yet, read these poems and tell me that I'm right so I can feel better about myself.
August 6, 2016
A weird one, and I honestly don't quite know what to do with it. What I got from it is a sense of fragmentation and detachment, but not much sense in the traditional sense. (Sense has so many meanings!) Maybe that quality of detachment was the whole point, though.
(Feel free to ignore my opinion, I'm not an expert poetry reader.)
(Feel free to ignore my opinion, I'm not an expert poetry reader.)
June 18, 2016
I don't know what it was that I loved. But it was this.
September 3, 2011
Some strange things started happening when I read "Ghost Machine." I live in an apartment complex, and across the parking lot, behind a thin tree line, there is a park. I was reading "Ghost Machine" on the balcony. It was about midnight, and suddenly I heard a guy in the park doing karate moves. Of course I could not hear karate moves, but I could hear him yelling, the "Hi-ya" or whatever that accompanies the idea of compacting all energy into a body movement. It seems a little silly, but at the moment, hearing him and reading these poems, I thought that this man was capturing the essence of the book.
"Ghost Machine" is about impressions of people, not like someone meeting someone for the first time, but someone arriving to a place and still being able to feel the previous occupant. Almost like renting an apartment. Almost like buying a used car. Ben Mirov has given us poems that feel used, as if the person has left and these are scraps of his life that he forgot to take. We are looking through them, sentence by sentence, not really getting the full picture, but just enough of the picture to draw our own conclusions.
This works because the language is sparse. The lines are short. It is like fingerprints are more defined when the fingers have been placed on glass longer, but still they are just fingerprints, never the whole finger. We can imagine what the fingers look like from the fingerprints, but honestly we will never know. I can to decipher more. I can try reading these poems over and over. I can even memorize the entire book, but the meaning and pictures will still be mostly made in my mind.
I was finishing this collection tonight, on the same balcony. I was reading and a locust flew up and hit the glass balcony door. Locusts are rarely ever seen, only the shells they leave behind after they have grown. To be able to see the actual bug, to almost get nailed in the head as it drunkly flew toward the door, made me think of the best way to sum up this collection. These poems are like a shell of a locust. I know that the locust exists, but the only proof of the shell that he leaves behind.
"Ghost Machine" is about impressions of people, not like someone meeting someone for the first time, but someone arriving to a place and still being able to feel the previous occupant. Almost like renting an apartment. Almost like buying a used car. Ben Mirov has given us poems that feel used, as if the person has left and these are scraps of his life that he forgot to take. We are looking through them, sentence by sentence, not really getting the full picture, but just enough of the picture to draw our own conclusions.
This works because the language is sparse. The lines are short. It is like fingerprints are more defined when the fingers have been placed on glass longer, but still they are just fingerprints, never the whole finger. We can imagine what the fingers look like from the fingerprints, but honestly we will never know. I can to decipher more. I can try reading these poems over and over. I can even memorize the entire book, but the meaning and pictures will still be mostly made in my mind.
I was finishing this collection tonight, on the same balcony. I was reading and a locust flew up and hit the glass balcony door. Locusts are rarely ever seen, only the shells they leave behind after they have grown. To be able to see the actual bug, to almost get nailed in the head as it drunkly flew toward the door, made me think of the best way to sum up this collection. These poems are like a shell of a locust. I know that the locust exists, but the only proof of the shell that he leaves behind.
September 24, 2010
This was one of those books that seemed like it came at just the right time for me. I loved its muted sadness and the occasionally surreal descriptions of that sadness. Mirov seems to be in the same poetic school as Zach Schomburg (love that dude!). I like the way Mirov's poems sample from each other throughout this book. It's like a book eating its own tail. I don't think Caketrain printed too many of these things, so you should get it now before it's long gone.
May 29, 2010
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.
October 18, 2020
This is a book of sentences and many of them are beautiful, but I can’t help leaving the book feeling it could have been more potent, more pared down. Mirov plays with repetition in exciting ways but my favorite parts of the book were the dreamiest, the strange machines and unreachable lakes. I also left this book with some weird feelings about how Mirov talks about sex & the female body - something I’d have to return to but that’s nagging at me a bit, and kept nagging at me as I read. I love the ghostly, dead love-poemy parts of this book. I didn’t care as much about the piss and beer and San Francisco grunge.
October 27, 2013
The self conscious I/eye schism of these poems, this use of the ghost trope, and the inherent cleverness of these poems/prose poems just left me cold. Mirov seems more wedded to his project than the poetry of the project, which is a risk many poets make.
October 14, 2015
This one really meandered for me. I think it's about disconnecting from daily life--shopping, having sex, etc--and the text mimics it to a fault. Eventually it got to be almost somewhat of a mantra, a seance for the doldrums, but even that wasn't enough. The pieces don't add up for me.
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April 10, 2012... I dont think I like it. I shouldn't say that. You should never dislike something just because you don't understand it. I'm going to need to spend some time with this collection.
April 24, 2014
EYE LOVE THIS BKKK. EYE FEEL LIKE THIS BKKK IS A COLD SHWWWER IN WNNNTR. EYE RECOMMEND THIS B////K AND ANY OTHER B@@K BEN MIROV WRITES.
July 29, 2015
Not for me. Don't see the Schomburg comparisons at all. Really wanted to like this one, but in the end could not. Could not at all.
December 21, 2017
You know what? I let this one simmer and I like it more than when I first read it.
It's fragmented and strange. It becomes eerie with the imagery and you have to try to understand what voice you're reading and what that means for the story. I feel like this is a collection you could read multiple times and start piecing together a more defined story, almost like a book. It is experimental but the diction is right and the format better than others I've been reading.
It's fragmented and strange. It becomes eerie with the imagery and you have to try to understand what voice you're reading and what that means for the story. I feel like this is a collection you could read multiple times and start piecing together a more defined story, almost like a book. It is experimental but the diction is right and the format better than others I've been reading.
March 25, 2023
I picked this book up for a dollar at a local bookstore. I couldn’t find much about it online. I love all poetry - to me, if someone cared enough to write it - I should care enough to read it. this book is weird. but i loved it - so many thoughts shoved into random pages. it’s like reading someone’s train of thought or proofreading an essay - it reminds me a lot of computer programming. i enjoyed it.
February 4, 2021
This is one I had to just let wash over me. I definitely got the setting and the mood. The narrative, if there was one, eludes me. But I liked it.
May 16, 2012
Ghost Machine is beautiful and quiet and beautifully quiet in much the same way an atomic cloud or a large-scale building demolition is in a living room, dark, with the sound of the television switched off. The ground in Ghost Machine rumbles in careful, steady waves: a kind of ordered chaos.
Ghost Machine makes a sound like this:
“The day goes on too long, gets brittle and close. I sleep on my stomach and drift through the rain. My ticket passes through a machine and I wander to a map. I’m still in her room, but I’m not there. I don’t know who sleeps on the other side. It takes a year to sketch the pain.”
Ghost Machine ends and then Ghost Machine begins: Ghost Machine continuously eats itself to live.
Ghost Machine makes a sound like this:
“The day goes on too long, gets brittle and close. I sleep on my stomach and drift through the rain. My ticket passes through a machine and I wander to a map. I’m still in her room, but I’m not there. I don’t know who sleeps on the other side. It takes a year to sketch the pain.”
Ghost Machine ends and then Ghost Machine begins: Ghost Machine continuously eats itself to live.
July 24, 2016
Still speechless. Definitely a reread. It creates strange feelings which I never experienced reading anything else. The dissociative, existentialistic characteristics left me bewildered. Sometimes it was like the sentences in itself displayed a scene or description which totally messed up place, time and order, like we are becoming a ghost by reading it. The unique writing style and reordering of sentences by the ghost machine is an interesting concept. More questions then answers, but definitely unique and creative.
July 13, 2013
You wake up sweating and you wonder if you've been chasing the ghost through Dolores. Or maybe he's been chasing you. Or maybe you conjured this whole book yourself.
Every line is its own dream. What should be such a delicate, spiderweb structure, manages to hold up stanzas, pages, chapters. You wake up and you wonder did this book happen?
This book kicked me in the stomach. Ten out of ten. Will read again.
Every line is its own dream. What should be such a delicate, spiderweb structure, manages to hold up stanzas, pages, chapters. You wake up and you wonder did this book happen?
This book kicked me in the stomach. Ten out of ten. Will read again.
August 22, 2013
I'd been reading this slowly, pieces at a time, but then I changed gears, started over and ripped through it on a lake beach. I liked it a lot that way -- the narrative piling on and the repetition. And I'd be remiss to not shout-out whomever designed this book: spot-on, beautiful-but-simple, gently amping the reading experience. Kudos all.
August 28, 2013
This book should have come with free ellipses for the reader to add as they engaged the text, which, far as I can tell, is a collection of non-sequiturs that, over the course of its 97 pages, feel like a strobe-lighted story that, for me, just never came together and yet was beautifully suggestive and finally fulfilling in the way life can be, unimaginably incomplete and only partial cognizant.
May 11, 2013
3 stars means i liked it. i'm not as sold as i thought i would be. but, i also didn't like 'goodwill hunting' as much as everyone thought i should. mirov is a good writer; i'm just not convinced he's a great poet.
June 28, 2010
I outright reviewed the book for Bookslut: coming soon on the web!
August 13, 2010
Ethereal flashes. They all clicked together and drifted into one another. I'll prob blog this up pretty soon. I was unhappy to see the book end.
Oh, and kick ass cover.
Oh, and kick ass cover.
March 14, 2011
One of the best books of poetry I've read in the last few years - it's genius.
September 13, 2011
One of those great poetry books that creates its own way of hitting on several recurring themes. I'm glad I bought this one, because I'm certain I will be going back to it.
June 2, 2011
the beautiful, the sincere, the distanced sad. i feel a personal attachment to these poems, and it feels quite nice.
March 2, 2012
What a sad little book. Has a commanding forward-moving force and sense of mystery despite/because of its focused style and subject. Mesmerizing.
February 9, 2018
Eye don't get it.
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December 24, 2017What to say. For the first third, I was excited about this collection. Each piece seemed to lean on the one before, gradually building up a vocabulary of symbolism that would give more depth to each image. After that, though, either I totally lost the thread, or the thread disappeared, and nothing in the recursiveness added any little bit of context to allow me to understand. It was hard to keep reading. There is a general sense of sadness and absence that holds promise, it's just too personal and too obscure for me to connect to as a reader.
To be fair to author, I've felt this way about several poetry collections, some very famous and beloved by others. I think symbolism in poetry is like that; sometimes we just don't click.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews