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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.
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
"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
