Named the "Best First Book of the Year" by Coldfront Magazine, and short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets Award, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, this debut collection of poetry by Joe Pan marks the beginning of a promising career, "with language that is striking," one reviewer puts it, "nearly perfect."

An American poet in Italy learns of a terrible tragedy that sends him into a deep spiral of personal reflection. The next day he buys a small notebook before boarding a train from Venice to Florence. Moved by this loss, the political forces operating back home, and the culture and people surrounding him, he finds himself attempting to write a book of poetry in a single day.This book, subtitled Autobiomythography V, constitutes the fifth installment in a series by Joe Pan.

The poetry of Chris Cook is evidence of a fine mind at work, a collection of poems that never settles for the obvious. His work probes the apathy and alienation of his generation, wielding poetics like a cudgel to extract the essential from the incoherence of pop culture vapidity that we have accepted as our metaphor. Startlingly honest, unafraid of humor, these poems force you to sit down and take notice. -Cheeni Rao

Poetry. Travel Writing. Taking cues from a myriad of short forms haiku, epigram, bon mot, aphorism, senry the poems in Joe Pan's HICCUPS search out unexpected ways to document events in transition. Here the imminent moment, deeply regarded, is agitated into performance or merely left to drift, generating through language a curious experience of its own making. The disparate settings of these poems are as diverse as the impulses that gave rise to the work a Tokyo skyscraper, a South African wildlife preserve, a log cabin in the Pacific Northwest, a shark-infested reef off Belize. These are poems that arrive with a jolt, engulfing the familiar, before being left to linger or dissolve. "Pan's latest presents new rewards with each reading." Publishers Weekly"

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.

he current political climate of confrontation between Islamist regimes and Western governments has resulted in the proliferation of essentialist perceptions of Iran and Iranians in the West. Such perceptions do not reflect the complex evolution of Iranian identity that occurred in the years following the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and the anti-imperialist Islamic Revolution of 1979. Despite the Iranian government’s determined pursuance of anti-Western policies and strict conformity to religious principles, the film and literature of Iran reflect the clash between a nostalgic pride in Persian tradition and an apparent infatuation with a more Eurocentric modernity. In Familiar and Foreign, Mannani and Thompson set out to explore the tensions surrounding the ongoing formulation of Iranian identity by bringing together essays on poetry, novels, memoir, and films. These include both canonical and less widely theorized texts, as well as works of literature written in English by authors living in diaspora. Challenging neocolonialist stereotypes, these critical excursions into Iranian literature and film reveal the limitations of collective identity as it has been configured within and outside of Iran. Through the examination of works by, among others, the iconic female poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the expatriate author Goli Taraqqi, the controversial memoirist Azar Nafisi, and the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, this volume engages with the complex and contested discourses of religion, patriarchy, and politics that are the contemporary product of Iran’s long and revolutionary history.