Description
Book SynopsisIn this collection, Aaron Shurin has brought together thirty years’ worth of his provocative essays. Fuelled by gender and queer studies and combined with radical traditions in poetry, Shurin’s essays combine a highly personal and lyrical vision with a trenchant social analysis of poetry’s possibilities.
Trade ReviewReading these essays I’m struck by how fully Aaron Shurin combines a personal history with a prophetic, conceptual, strongly non-personal vision. With masterful intelligence he has presided over, partaken of, and influenced through his analysis avant-gardes as varied as Language Poetry, New Narrative, and conceptual or procedural poetry, on each of which he has written near-definitive texts. His writing about AIDS, brilliantly gathered here—rich, fantastic, and steely-eyed—encompasses the functions of a great novel: total immersion into a mysterious eco-political world. The Skin of Meaning concludes with a bracing interview, in which one of the more profoundly original poets of our day insists on a ‘unity of semantic and phonemic density together’ as poetry’s bottom line, at which point one wants to stand up and cheer, book in hand—book flies into sky, into stars, into the ages.” —Kevin Killian, California College of the Arts
