What 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.

Feeling adventurous in an opportunity to expand my poetic boundaries, I decided to try my luck with Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine. A collection of recurring remnants of consciousness, Mirov intriguingly re-conceptualizes what we traditionally conceive as transparent floating entities. For the most part, in his collection Mirov seemingly hovers through the trivial and mundane stuff we typically do when we’re preparing for other bigger things. But beneath his continual and often nonchalant stream of consciousness is a desperation and numbness that fades in and out. It is here where the concept of ghost becomes most present, where he fades in and out from periods of an undisclosed foggy autopilot to make sudden tsunamis of melancholy epiphanies. Selections like ‘Eye, Ghost’ display Mirov’s ache to assert any form of control he can manage, the only form being language. ‘UMMM Machine’ is particularly memorable for me, with lines such as ‘My soul is sent to another city to organize a puddle. I hear the bullshit and choose another.’ Getting caught in futility and the unreachable is a prominent theme, coupled with the beauty of unattainable forests and clouds. A rewarding read, Ghost Machine is poetry that warns us to beware the autopilot switch we can become all too comfortable with. ( )