Poetry. "Mirov's poems are like dead soul dispatches from an emotional robot. Contained in them is the terrible recognition of the mere materiality of the universe and that somehow arising from that is an irrational attachment to friends, loves, and a man named Ben Mirov. The poems are an attempt to speak of these things, often opening into imaginative spaces tinged with the absurd. The continued disconnect between what the speaker describes and what he may or may not feel is funny, until it's revealed to also be sad." Dan Magers "Ben Mirov writes, 'The high-fives are meant to signify celebratory attitudes and reinforce the sense of comradery we feel in the wake of our semi-athletic achievement.' For the 'semi-athletic' achiever in all of us, HIDER ROSER gives free $12 high-fives." Amanda Nadelberg "It seems like HIDER ROSER was written by Ben Mirov. His name appears on the cover and in the poems the book contains. However, he did not write this book. I did. Ben Mirov's function in the process was more like an android, receiving messages from an alien source. If you ever actually meet the vessel I know as Ben Mirov, his personality and conversational capacity will underwhelm you. I hope these poems will not." the author of HIDER ROSER"

Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From Bewilderment: October The day was hot, and entirely breathless, so The remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fall Seemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was like The ticking sound of gentle rainfall as They gently fell on leaves already fallen, Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touched One or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar.