Overview

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 Franciscopast, present, and future.

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9781643620169

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Reviews

Intensely interrogative... Shurin has created a body of work sparked by the low and inspired by the high... always spiraling more and more poetic thought... Once he has given us his flowers of the field talk, Shurin raises his head skyward. It is a wonderfully balanced maneuver, giving us a parallel of particular with universal... Shurin keeps his focus on the revelations in each governing image... At once literary criticism and memoir, Flowers & Sky gives cutting insight into the poetic process illuminating for readers and writers alike.' -- Daniel Casey, Heavy Feathers Review In this lecture, Shurin creates a mash note to Shakespeare's Eros, with evocative words like oxlips, eglantine, and many others. The talk also contains a short tribute to Denise Levertov and Shurin's friendship with her in the late sixties. The relationship was a kind of mutual doxology and can remind others of what Shurin knows but leaves unsaid: If leaders of governments revered the earth as Levertov did, as Shurin does, and if these leaders learned Shakespeare's symbolic language of flowers, and all plant life, Levertov and hordes of others would not have needed to throw themselves into antiwar activism. Think Agent Orange and other immensely powerful efficient defoliants that have been part of humankind's arsenals. --Barbara Berman, The Rumpus The title of Shurin's 11th collection sets up expectations of direct political engagement by the 60-odd short, tightly composed, and finally constrained-in-scope prose pieces that compose it. Here's how My Democracy begins: Where do you look and how do you look? Architects in doorways--bombshells of cryptic shrubbery--to catch a ripple and go Delphic... The poem is pleasantly Ashberian in its obscure semicritique of consumer society. Later, Then begins Once we were in the loop... slick with information and the luster of good timing. We folded our clothes, goes on to imagine platinum clocks sweeping in arcs from left to right, and ends, Our clothing was spectacular and fit to a T. We admired each other with ferocity. Shurin, a well-respected West Coast poet, is the author of Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997). This book may not be that one's equal, but it suggests no diminishment of Shurin's capabilities. --Publishers Weekly

Aaron Shurin's queer sentences have for decades liberated both gender and genre. Few poets wear their syntax with a fit so sensuous, so glamorous, but no one shows up to the poem dressed quite like him in the fabulous finery of 'crimson rebellion and orange confetti.' And no one else insists not only on the poem as a means of enchantment but also as an impassioned expression of enchantment's political and existential necessity. 'This was essential, ' Shurin declares, 'I had to make the walls sing.' And sing they do, as does every syllable in The Blue Absolute, tuned as they are to catch the frequency of a radical erotic music that's demanded nothing less than total devotion from the poet: 'tear up the book, feed it to the song, feed all to all.' Indeed, each of these ravishing sentences is an offering to all and a model of prosody that elicits from poet and reader alike a pose of surrender and a shiver of thanks. --Brian Teare Aaron Shurin's The Blue Absolute is a wonder composed by one of our most crucial poets who has trained his considerable powers of observation to exceed time and space. Refusing singularity, having long ago stolen 'gender from the fem-bots and dude droids, ' Shurin has steadfastly become our poet of permeability in accord, in concord, with weather, city, lovers. His sharp attention to the everyday gives way to an expansive vision in the ever-changing cosmos that can be found in a room, on a street, at the kitchen table. Don't miss 'Shiver, ' his magisterial paean to San Francisco. In lieu of America's shrinking whispers of fear and scarcity, we receive the bounty of a maximalist: Mortality, paradise, ecstasy, days of youth, of aging, unfold into a sublime as close and shifting as the very sky. --Gillian Conoley 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

Author Information

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (poems, 2012) and King of Shadows (essays, 2008). His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry to Italy's Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. A longtime educator, he's the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

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