Böcker av Aaron Shurin

A new and selected collection of poetry from a legend of San Francisco’s literary community.From the early days of Gay Liberation to innovations in contemporary verse, Aaron Shurin’s has been a singular voice in American poetry. His work has unwaveringly maintained lyric presence while at the same time utilizing narrative tensions and structural constraints—especially in his chosen form of the prose poem. His queer eye has never wavered—yet his has never been a poetry confined to one audience, one mode. Elixir draws from a dozen books over a period of fifty years, presciently investigating issues of gender, homosexuality, identity, and subjectivity, via ecstatic diction, luxurious sound-scape, creative grammar, and radical form.

​​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.

Urban and pastoral, highly figured and fragmented, grieving and dreaming, the prose poems of The Blue Absolute set people moving and thinking amidst a flurry of dashes, dots, perspective shifts, and the fragmented action of San Francisco, the great city on the edge.

Using Shakespeare's sonnets, this book shows how the involuntary expression of language is suffused with cultural intent, how much the rhythms of the past permeate the present - and how many lost friends, lovers, and opportunities can be heard in the music of the current moment.

In 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.