Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine: A Review by Iris Cushing

Are Ben Mirov’s poems haunted? Perhaps not so much as they are preoccupied—inhabited by something that was there before anyone arrived, including, perhaps, the poet himself. Ghost Machine guides us through the narrator’s material occupations: food, friends, money, sex. The conspicuous absence of what corresponds to these occupations—nourishment, comfort, love—hums and glows under the poems’ surface. Here we meet a narrator who reveals this absence while keeping its mystery intact.

Mirov has a great knack for writing sentences that recreate the cadence and rhythm of everyday life. Owing much to the newly-minted poetic economy of email and text messages, each largely-unpunctuated sentence is only long enough to fulfill its purpose. Modified versions of the same sentence are repeated in a manner that calls out to Lyn Hejinian’s poetic autobiography My Life. While Hejinian’s repetitions are systematic, Mirov’s crop up unexpectedly, appearing on either side of the divide between conscious and subconscious thought. “My bed is an ear that cannot record,” for instance, is transformed fifty pages later into “her face is an ear that cannot record.” Thrilling moments occur when the narrator alters his language before our very eyes: “I change love poem to move pole.” These repetitions and transformations progress as effortlessly, and disturbingly, as recurring dreams (or nightmares).

In reading this collection, I couldn’t help but think of the fact that spirits refers to both ghosts and alcoholic beverages. It’s not a coincidence. The altered logic of inebriation is examined here with an objective clarity that is at once horrifying and hilarious. Sentences like “I’d like to kill a forty” and “I’m smashed after three drinks” point to the way our language treats alcohol as a living, willful entity. In Mirov’s world, everything is fair game for this kind of treatment: one may just as easily “go down on the breeze” or “eat a man made of dreams.” Booze is one of many spirits that underlie the superficial simplicity of these poems, influencing the poems’ inhabitants in ways beyond their control.

The deadpan extremity of Mirov’s tone allows for some very funny moments. Anyone who appreciates Twin Peaks will enjoy the seamless transitions from serious to ridiculous, as in “Ghost (1:42 a.m.):

The spirit world shifts behind me. There’s coffee on my shirt, not blood. I can’t absorb information on a bench in Dolores. I had a dream we were in a hotel. Your blonde friend was faceless. She offered me salsa.

As in Mirov’s other collection, I is to Vorticism, mundane subject matter is treated with a correspondingly plain voice; between the two, the unexpected emerges in the form of some unarticulated hilarity or doom just under the surface of everything. “I erase what I compress, “ Mirov says. Here, the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary is compressed so much that it disappears. Mirov finds ghosts haunting our shared language, just as he finds them haunting his private life. I arrived at the end of this book as if having just woken up on the BART train, with no memory of where I was before, and upon entering the somnambulant fog of San Francisco in search of a burrito, found instead the phantom afterglow of Ghost Machine.

—

Iris Cushing lives in Brooklyn and is an editor for Argos Books.