Overview

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.

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9781643622767

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Reviews

“Once again, Aaron Shurin proves to be one of America’s greatest poets. The Blue Absolute is a lesson in how to write prose poems that sway, tilt, shiver, quake, torque, pulse, thunder, and dance. Aboard the vessel of this form, Shurin sails behind, in, and under the sensual dimensions of joy and grief, love and loss, youth and age, sex and death. In the end, this book teaches us how to feed our ‘beautiful naked grief’ to song so that we may live indomitably.” –Craig Santos Perez, in praise of The Blue Absolute

""Across the decades, the enduring thread in Shurin’s poetry has been an unwavering attention to beauty—and to the act of creating it. Through the poem, the world is made anew."" —Tiff Dressen, Los Angeles Review of Books “Once again, Aaron Shurin proves to be one of America’s greatest poets.” —Craig Santos Perez “[A] conversion to the heart of what speech and song mean to be that is the true voice Poetry waits for.” —Robert Duncan “This is what an active poetry can do, then, make something in mind be there—not just talked about and forgotten.”  —Robert Creeley “[Shurin’s] has never been a poetry of uncomplicated self-expression, but a poetry that seeks both to embody and to incite transformation . . . An important addition to and revision of the canon of American poetry.” —Reginald Shepherd “What we have here is a bounty of controlled ripeness, elastic and kinetic . . . These poems . . . pull and draw, in an almost chemical/medicinal way, toward a more expansive understanding of how language translates seeing and feeling.” —Barbara Berman ""An utter gem . . . Like loose threads hanging on the backside of a tapestry, Shurin’s poems are interconnected and constellated."" —Timothy Liu, Plume

“Once again, Aaron Shurin proves to be one of America’s greatest poets. The Blue Absolute is a lesson in how to write prose poems that sway, tilt, shiver, quake, torque, pulse, thunder, and dance. Aboard the vessel of this form, Shurin sails behind, in, and under the sensual dimensions of joy and grief, love and loss, youth and age, sex and death. In the end, this book teaches us how to feed our ‘beautiful naked grief’ to song so that we may live indomitably.” —Craig Santos Perez, in praise of The Blue Absolute

Author Information

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose. He has been a central member of the San Francisco Bay Area writing community for half a century, having taught a generation of poets at universities throughout the city. A graduate himself of the storied Poetics Program at the New College of California, he is a professor emeritus and former director of the MFA Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Shurin has been a pioneer in LGBTQ studies and in contemporary innovative poetry, challenging fixed notions of gender and sexual identity, lyricism and narrativity, the structure of verse, and for forty years, in language both lush and colloquial, he has pioneered the resurgence of the prose poem as a critical modern art form.

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