Alternate Covers for Mirov's "Ghost Machine"

Ben Mirov has revealed two alternate covers for "Ghost Machine," his soon-to-be-released winner of Caketrain's 2009 Chapbook Competition, on his blog. The post covers his writing process for the collection, as well as for the related "Collected Ghost," another of his chapbooks I reviewed on this site in November.

Among the revelations:

"The poems are all collage poems made up of sentences I wrote after a breakup. I was also unemployed and sleeping on my brother's couch. I wrote most of the sentences as a method of passing time and dealing with my fucked emotional state. I would describe my overriding emotion during that time as a feeling of emptiness. I wrote so many sentences during that period. I wrote down things I heard people say. I wrote down things I thought or dreamt. I wrote down things that happened on TV or in books I was reading. I wrote down sentences I made up. I wrote down anything. The majority of the sentences were short and used simple grammar. They weren't really poems."

Most of the poems were written in San Francisco in 2006, Mirov writes, and he didn't revise the manuscript until later when he moved to New York. It took him three years to do it.

"It was like sampling myself," he writes.

"Ghost Machine" will be published by Caketrain sometime in May. One of the alternate covers -- the other is much more colorful -- is pictured above, designed by Caketrain's Joseph Reed.

Matt Bell's "Collectors" Love Trash

Matt Bell -- who I commented on late last year for his fantastic short "Mario's Three Lives" -- has been offering "The Collectors," his runner-up manuscript in Caketrain's 2008 Chapbook Competition, as a free download on his Web site. Caketrain published the book in May 2009 but it's since gone out of print, which is good for Bell and the publisher (selling out of books is always good for authors and their publishers) but is even better for those of us who can now read it at no charge.

The book is the tale of compulsive hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer in 1940s Manhattan, whose home has become like a pool where all the tainted waters of their material lives have been collected and frozen in a kind of interior structure of decay. It's an interesting, creepy read, and holds the honored distinction of being the first (and currently only) publication I enjoyed enough to read it in it's entirety on my iPod touch.

It also reminded me of the above "Sesame Street" video, featuring Oscar the Grouch, who, after making the inadvertent connection, I can't think of Bell's story without picturing as the protagonist.

Incidentally, it was recently announced that Bell's short story "Dredge" -- originally published in Hayden's Ferry Review 45, which coincidentally has a cover image that could have come straight from the Collyer's home -- has been selected for "The Best American Mystery Stories 2010," to be published this fall. Obviously Bell is an author to keep an eye on.

Mirov's "Ghost" Wins Caketrain Competition

Caketrain announced the results of their 2009 poetry chapbook competition this morning, and taking home top honors is "Ghost Machine," by poet Ben Mirov, whose "Collected Ghost" was reviewed by Poetic Desperation in November.

Mirov's manuscript will see publication this summer as the seventh title in Caketrain's ongoing chapbook series, along with runner-up Lucas Farrell's "Bird Any Damn Kind" as the eighth.

The chapbook competition will return this May, with the genre focus shifting back to fiction and with a new guest serving as final judge. The judge for 2009 was poet Michael Burkard.

You can get a copy of Mirov's latest, "I is to Vorticisim," the cover of which is illustrated above, through his blog, Amazon or its publisher, New Michigan Press.