Books published by Operating System

"So often our urgencies upend themselves into absurdities. Lyric turns to joke and then to pugnacious elegy. So in Flatt's and Mund's Chlorosis, a dying world becomes a dynamic collaboration. Given options that find us 'imping toward stasis,' this poetry reanimates and throws color and light on a dimming horizon. Can poetry save us? Maybe not. But perhaps what we need now is sustenance, not salvation. Both slapstick and delicate, Chlorosis sustains the witness necessary to this moment. Now, in this 'fugitive dimension,' we are borne on 'an absent violence,' 'still and waking for that which we lack / from which to emerge.'"-Elizabeth Robinson"In these poems, Michael Flatt and Derrick Mund flicker between digital screens and imperceptibly crumbling landscapes to create a series of nameless glances cast at a contemporary psychic abyss. Here, Chlorosis reads like a thread of linked pastorals-eulogizing the living room of a broken American heart-choked by sunlit swarms of dust motes and a soft, semi-urban dread."-Janaka Stucky"Chlorosis is a moving experiment in the uses of the poetic 'we' in a time of crisis. It hangs tight-it usually means just two people. The component members of that 'we' write to each other, as each other, and for each other. And as they survey together a world in which there is no respite from the oncoming disaster, that 'we' becomes a tiny, nimble pivot for unexpected clarities and also for the testing out of tentative rhythms-both of which we'll all be needing, from here on out."-Christopher NealonWith Chlorosis-a leaf disease in plant life caused by lack of light, literally translated as "green sickness"-Flatt and Mund explore the difficulties of finding and sustaining love in the midst of the various toxicities of the anthropocene: slow violence, environmental catastrophe, economic malaise, polluted cultural memory, digital abjection, etc. Alternating between lyrical address and objectivist observation, this collection of untitled poems also engages with voices from the fields of ecopoetics and new materialism. In this collaboration, the first-person pronouns break down actively, alertly, and unevenly, alongside generalized collapse. Love, however-humanist love, romantic love, brotherly love-is never far from view.

"In a story of William Carlos Williams as a child, told by his mother, the poet puts the wrong shoes on the wrong feet by accident and upon realizing it, leaves them on for a while thinking about how weird it feels. Anne Gorrick does something like that, but with the internet and gender fluidity, in this brilliantly bizarre new book of poems. Searching for anything other than correct answers, pursuing online flaneurie by translation of source texts, the explosive humor here of interruptions, half-remembered allusions, and shifts in diction invents a gonzo musical logic, a texture which stops off at Jackson Mac Low, at Leslie Scalapino's splintered phenomenology, and at a NY school idiom of being surprised by your own writing, before continuing on with its own glorious road movie. "Kiss the snot otter in a hard hat / and then tell a story about your stuff" "Is Percocet on the periodic table?" "Herpes travels to a science center as Brineshrimpdirect" "Plenty of fish, please touch, pleaser shoes" "She is pro-life curious"" - Trace Peterson"'An Absence' is the news told in "Starfish Slang" and delivered to the house of poetry. You think this book of poems should land on the front lawn, but instead it crashes through the living room window and shatters predictability. It startles you, but no one gets hurt, you are only more aware of the world around you. And healed by the inventory. Anne Gorrick confounds and clarifies through a determined weaving, that is both familiar and strange. The poetry seems to be an accident, but you know it is full of care, and you can't help but rubberneck as the scenes that are revealed line by line become increasingly absurd and revelatory. It is a time capsule and core sample, compiled from fragments of beauty and danger. There is no turning back." -Michael Rothenbergfrom the author:"These poems began in 2011 with an investigation into John Cage's adventures with chance. I was working at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and we had a small museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, with a regular exhibition called Reading Objects. The idea of the show is to explore and expand on what is traditionally said on those little cards next to paintings. So we were presented with an array of visual work, and could pick pieces to write about. I decided to write something to accompany a musical score by Cage that was to be part of exhibition. I wrote something, and I came to hate it. This poem was displayed next to Cage's score. I felt I didn't nearly go far enough with the poem to really engage with Cage. So I started again by researching Cage, and I also spent time with Jackson Mac Low's 'Representative Works.' "Around this time, I began to really notice and found myself entertained by the way search engines attempt to anticipate our needs. I began to slowly type lines of poetry (eventually working my way toward entire short poems) into the Google and Bing search boxes, and laugh my way through the list of wrongly anticipated results that appeared underneath my search. I began to make poems out of these (wrong) search results. At first, I thought I was adding chance into the poem, but I came to realize it was just the opposite: these search results came from the zeitgeist's algorithmic desire, not my own, which ended up expanding the possibilities for the poem. The poetic "I" dissolves in this desire." - Anne Gorrick

"It turns out Wally Swist is a skilled essayist and reviewer as well as a celebrated poet and a decidedly eclectic reader. Singing for Nothing (the title alone says something about the condition of poetry) is a refined review of the work of both known and overlooked contemporary poets, as well as essays and reviews of the work of a range of artists, writers, and even scientists. The accounts are so intriguing, even for those unfamiliar with the subterranean world of poetry or obscure literature, after reading this book one would want to head off to the nearest library or bookstore and see what you've missed." - John Hanson Mitchell "Wally Swist's life has been steeped in poetry and guided by a steadfast belief in the power of literature. As book seller, a book creator, a poet, an essayist, a reviewer, and a generous supporter of other writers, he inhabits a world in which reading is indivisible from writing, and can't be untangled from life itself. So, it seems utterly fitting that Singing for Nothing maps that life by way of his essays and reviews. Through the assiduous shaping of his critical commentary on literature from around world and close to home, Swist has created a distinctive, thought-provoking memoir that is also a celebration of literature itself. " - Jane Brox Singing for Nothing was written over a period of 40 years. The essays, reviews, and other selected prose collected here constitute the author's poetic ruminations, his political and social thought, and his perennial philosophy over that time-to now. Much of the book was composed only recently in an attempt to push the traditional boundaries of nonfiction and memoir. Each of the eight chapters are introduced with anecdotal material from Swist's literary life, which albeit was impoverished financially, at times, but nearly always rich with his meetings with authors and his luminous reading through the years. Topics include reviews of the work of significant poets and writers; a chapter regarding haiku, an often misunderstood Japanese poetic form, and its intersection with Zen; a few academic essays regarding pop culture, the science of measurement, and the history of retirement in America; several blogs regarding psycho-spirituality; and a guided morning meditation using the chakras closes this book, which also includes some of this award-winning poet's poetry. The volume's subtitle, 'Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir', is apropos for what this book both embraces and what it explores by pressing the limits of traditional literary boundaries. Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015); and Invocation (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in many publications, including Commonweal, North American Review, Rattle, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011 (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), and upstreet. A poem of Swist's was recently included on the national radio program The Writer's Almanac.

"Johnny Damm's Science of Things Familiar diagrams the ways we move toward and away from one another, exploring relationship through the failures and disjuncts that reveal it. In annotated illustrations taken out of their original context, in comics stripped of their narrative content, and in cinematic essays whose parts are sutured where they've been spliced, these pieces take apart the familiar to see what makes it tick. Troubling our assumptions about the workings of nonfiction, they reveal themselves as highly constructed, interweaving the personal and historical just as the book's "rat-a-tat" refrain rings out both drumbeat and gunfire. If we catch ourselves dancing, we've missed the point. Witty and serious, critical and compassionate, Damm invents a new visual poetics in which what we see and hear do not sync up. This is his way of waking us up with a "BLAM!" and "WHOOSH!" to the history of appropriation and conquest underlying America's popular forms. Nothing here is familiar, even as we recognize parts of the whole." - Amaranth Borsuk"Johnny Damm's 'Science of Things Familiar' mashes up Classics Illustrated, vintage diagrams, and film director bios to create an unlikely fusion that is a oblique yet often poignant autobiography as well as an essay on the way that we transform culture as much as it transforms us."- Matt Madden, author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style"'Science of Things Familiar' captures "freeze-frames" from the history of comic books, crime films, and blues music, all from the middle of the darkest century. Johnny Damm accents the pulpish poetics in both the visual poetry and the phonic milieu, experienced by the masses in each cheap genre made on the fly for everyone. " -Christian BökHerman Melville performing jumping jacks. An experimental Brazilian filmmaker making British propaganda films. A legendary delta bluesman who prefers to play the pop hits of the day. In Science of Things Familiar, Johnny Damm sifts through cultural detritus to disturb the sleeping past.In an uncategorizable mix of image and text, Science of Things Familiar scavenges from 50's pulp comics, 19th century scientific diagrams, film noir shooting scripts, and more. Damm introduces the reader to an American landscape of bastard blendings, where the familiar swiftly gives way to the uncanny.

"Richard Lucyshyn sees and hears what others sometimes miss or are not in the mood to receive; his poems change all that; they invite us into a world of astonishing unity and regard, into states and ideas, visions and mysteries, into abundantly and carefully layered regions within that world; we're invited to understand, marvel, and come away with newly minted, newly awakened brain waves; Lucyshyn's gift to us always leaves us grateful, glad and freshly activated" - Dara Wier, In the Still of the Night "Richard Lucyshyn's debut collection is a gorgeously tender, challenging psalm for the reckoners and seekers among us desperate to make sense of our dissonant and broken world, to be better than we are and have been, "to be again born, machined new" - it's an epic song for the strange unnamable that manages to invent, page after page, a staggering "new genus of ache." This collection is itself the machine that hopes, which is the machine we need more than ever right now. Ever incantatory, these poems are a choir, calling for and summoning grace at every turn." - Allison Titus, The True Book of Animal Homes "'I made for you a new machine…' immediately makes demands of you: 'say star and say sun // say halo frost and feather.' And it immediately tells you things about yourself you might not want to hear: 'Your penance is shabby…You will always hold dissonance and it will always be weird.' Lucyshyn earns this by being infinitely more self-critical: 'how many backs I tore / it was me what / 39 lashed / what held the whip / was me / what turned away.' Striking a seemingly impossible balance between what he calls 'a practiced stillness attended to" and the "ecstasy of text,' Lucyshyn creates a space both critical and celebratory, frenetic and meditative, contemporary and mythic. And only because he has the integrity to 'wager memories we dare to hold' are we left with 'the oily residue of hope.'" - Chris Tonelli, Whatever Stasis I made for you a new machine and all it does is hope concerns itself with the language of prayer and the action of prayer. Many of the poems, the [psalms] in particular, are the product of holding some word or phrase or sound in mind and mouth until it somehow exhales and reveals what word or phrase or sound it leads to. It's something more or less or not at all like dusting off some map that has always been exactly as it needed to be, that has never not existed.