Operating Systems - Softcover

Pan, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948510189 ISBN 13: 9781948510189

Publisher: Spork Press, 2019

Synopsis

Poetry. This expansive, ambitious collection by Joe Pan further exemplifies his talent for blending genres and pushing formally experimental narratives and lyrics into a wild array of thought-provoking poetry. From the familial to the fantastical to the socially political, Pan's maximalist style doesn't miss much, earning this collection its place among the most anticipated books of 2019. Highlighted by "Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper," a long poem about drone warfare already taught in classrooms around the countryâ€"Operating Systems approaches our complicated and shifting histories with empathy and an eye for the absurd.

"'I just discovered this form yesterday,' Pan writes, earlier in the book, but it applies best to the sprawling formless form of this hulking, brilliant anthem, this 'Bohemian Rhapsody' of a poem. ['Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper'] goes on to become a way of addressing Pan's own younger self, a personified lost innocence, and the Reaper becomes a figure of national tragedy, a character really not so different from the tall hooded farmer for which it was named. While praising it as poetry, and Pan as a poet, I want to scream that 'Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper' is not just a poemâ€"it's a memoir and an essay and a white paper about black hearts and black death. It's a sermon, and a polemic, and a treatise, and an ars poetica, and if you think I'm overselling it, then just go and read it, and see for yourself. I dare you."â€"JC Hallman, Brooklyn Rail

"It's uncomfortable to struggle with ['Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper's] ethical dilemmas. Pan reminds us we are complicit in the Reaper's exploits without shying away from the barriers to avoiding culpability...The collection's diversity is also a strength and most readers will find something to challenge or surprise them."â€"Eric Aldrich, Heavy Feather Review

About this title

About the Author

Joe Pan is the author of five poetry collections: Operating Systems (Spork Press, 2019), The Art Is a Lonely Hunter, Soffritto, Hi c cu ps, and Autobiomythography & Gallery, and served as co-editor of the best-selling Brooklyn Poets Anthology. His work has appeared in such venues as the Boston Review, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Review of Books. He is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Arts Press, an independent publishing house honored in 2016 with a National Book Award win in Poetry, as well as serving as the publisher of Augury Books, and is the founder of the services-oriented activist group Brooklyn Artists Helping.

From the Back Cover

"Frenetic, rhythmic, sonically rich--Operating Systems is an "effort in self-documentation/self-reconstruction," but more broadly, these poignant poems characterize the self in relation to its many communities, both imagined and real. Steeped in mythology, music, film, poetry, medicine, homelessness, social media, family, drones--chronicling the inner workings of the systems that rule our lives--Joe Pan's poetry approaches these concerns with a mixture of compassion, glee, terror, and fascination. These poems thump their way through time and genre while slantingly interrogating the innovative ways empire undoes itself."
-Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award Winner

"In a time when too many poems subsist on faded reflection and fingerpointing dressed up as ideas, Joe Pan is bringing expansive diction, finely characterized addressees, and raucous, digressive story-telling. His poetry is grounded in a combination of deeply prosodic vocal sensibility and protean wit, opening up the range necessary to channel the absurd and incendiary volume of detail endemic to our rather insane common world. That the poems elude cynicism without eliminating either hard truths or the capacity for satirical tonalities speaks to their ability to consistently re-imagine the curious plurality of that "you" one is constantly lookingfor, and after."
-Anselm Berrigan

"With fearsome virtuosity and ambition, Joe Pan's Operating Systems weaves the madness of our socio-political and cultural moment with family history, autobiography, myth, economic exigency, and the scrim of digital technology that overlays all of our contemporary lives. In stutters of ingenious lexical play, Pan's breathless poems beautifully enact the difficulty of utterance and of connection, and the anxiety and fragility of living in uncertain and morally bankrupt times. This is a heartbreaking work of formal risks you will return to again and again, "every room of text a honeymoon suite with at least one lover left to wonder in it"; I am so grateful for these deftly crafted rooms, for the wildness of their vision and the depth of their insistence."
-Debora Kuan

Edition details

• Publisher: Spork Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1948510189
• ISBN 13: 9781948510189
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126