Search results for ""Author Aaron Shurin""

The Blue Absolute’s prose poems are hot boxes of lyrical language combusting with daily life. People move and think amidst a flurry of dots and dashes in a constant shift of perspective and action—urban and pastoral, highly figured and fragmented, grieving and dreaming—each poem a compressed but fluid zone of almost psychedelic intensity. The book closes with “Shiver,” an American epic, at once a lament for and vision of a great city on the edge: San Francisco past, present, and future.

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Based on the author's life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin's coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall. Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyrics and The Paradise of Forms, named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

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​​A moving collection of essays that bring poetic insight to the sheer facts of the AIDS epidemic, in an attempt to make meaning from suffering.​​Unbound is a poet’s intimate account of life in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s during the apex of the AIDS epidemic. In his search for meaning, Shurin dives down into the broken-hearted, revelatory core of the social landscape and the lives of friends who both succumbed to and transcended the disease. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Unbound continues the search, resonating inescapably with the perils of our new pandemic. Shurin brings to life a familiar world tensed on the threshold of living, balanced precariously on the edges of love and friendship, family and community, rapture and mourning.

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