Operating Systems

by Joe Pan

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 country—Operating Systems approaches our complicated and shifting histories with empathy and an eye for the absurd. [from the publisher’s website)

Genres: Poetry

123 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Joe Pan’s debut literary crime thriller, FLORIDA PALMS, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice pick published by Simon & Schuster in July 2025, was called “A must read” in a starred review in Library Journal and “a musky, Florida-specific stew of sweat, blood, swamp gas and amphetamine addiction” in The New York Times Book Review. The novel has been optioned for a TV series by HBO.

Author of five poetry collections, Joe Pan has work that appeared in such publications as the Boston Review, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, and Poets & Writers, and has been profiled by CrimeReads, New York Post, Publishers Weekly, the Rumpus, and the Wall Street Journal. Joe is the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Arts Press, a small press honored with a National Book Award in Poetry, and is publisher of Augury Books, honored with a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. With his wife he co-founded Brooklyn Artists Helping (BAH), which serves unhoused populations.

Reviews

[Roselyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

so many thoughts.
this book is a beautiful and intricate collection of poems that assess the various operating systems in and around our lives. there is a sort socio-political flavor to this, especially Pan’s discussions on war, imperialism, drones, homelessness, etc. and i loved it.
really different from some of the more reflective poetry i typically engage with, and i think i read this at the perfect time in my life, as i contemplate the systems operating within my life, my mind, my body, and the systems i operate in within the social and political worlds around me.

some of my favorite lines (and there are so many):

“You were my wife, my republic, my butterfly Gemini. My / spoiler of gardens, my gutshot, my greeny gritty window of sexual renaissance / washed clean to worldly, drippy destitution. Goodbye, baby. Baby, goodbye.” (17)

“America, / amore, I can’t / I know / survive you. / Not exist within you now without resistance…” (18)

“Go ask the wasp tail. Go ask the green leaf / why it balances the trembling dewdrop / on its kitten paw. / There is no bottom to our greed for life.” (50)

“Divide orgasm from organism & what you get / is a different way in.” (52)

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will review this collection at greater length in another forum. Here I will say the following: it took me the better part of 4 months to finish reading this, not including the days I spent with "Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper" in 2014 when I first encountered it, and subsequently, rereading it in classes I was teaching or taking. 4 months is not a long time to spend with this collection, while reading other works, much in the same way that 2 or 3 months isn't much time to spend with David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." This is an important and ambitious work about how we process information today, what poetry is capable of doing or saying in the contemporary world, by an author who is capable of entertaining and exploring those ideas. Should you read it? You must!

[Wendy Pan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The long, well-researched, and extremely thoughtful prose poem contained within this collection, Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper, has been on my mind a lot recently.

I’ll include the first paragraph/stanza below. To my mind, this poem alone makes this poetry collection worth having on your shelf.

“(I dreamt you up in third grade.) Ultra-cool & promo slick, a predatory dart zip-lining threads of nimbi, unmanned, over darkling continents, your bot-brain is a paragon of focus & yet mechanizedly desireless, as self-aware as silverware, & thus incapable of cruelty when delivering laser-guided missiles calibrated to fountain a small bus full of explosives into a contained puff above a crowded marketplace, or slip eel-like through a cave’s oculate within the Hindu Kush. Your blurry, thermal aerial view beset with squared crosshairs a rookie war director’s owlet dream: oblivious vermin swept up with gestural efficiency from heights that confer the necessary filmic distance of omniscience, as if each strike were a warrant fulfilled by reason abiding divine instruction: Michelangelo’s God fist-bumping Adam. Edited & packaged, a select few videoed assaults ship to media outlets as evidence, an impressive staging intent to show a public what humdrum work war’s become—locate, track, eviscerate. Replicate. From these spare scenes of bombed & reconfigured wreckages of cars & buildings ghosting though a dusty plume arrives a satisfying vengeance for the loss of Sgt. Elias from Platoon, those spry young Wolverines in Red Dawn, & my uncle’s waking battle dreams (of the Vietnam variety) that go unmentioned in advertisements peddling the mastery of thumb-numbing single-shooter POV games for Xbox & PlayStation as a skill set, with once implausible credits transferable to active military duty. O to be gamers & destroyers, with each ethereal tick a countdown aria to roadside decimation or the anticipated readiness of microwaves pizza—“