Unbound - A Book of AIDS

​​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.

Sommario

Preface: Rebinding UnboundA Re-introduction to Unbound: A Book of AIDS 
Full Circle: Postscript to “City of Men” 
Notes from Under 
The Depositories 
Strips and Streamers 
Further Under 
Orphée: The Kiss of Death 
Turn Around: A Solo Dance with Voice 
A Lull in the Void: Postscript to “Turn Around” 
from The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks 
Human Immune 
My Memorial 
Some Haunting 
Inscribing AIDS: A Reflexive Poetics 
Shifting Paradise 
July 
Generation 
The Dance that We Made 
Appendices: 
Preface: Binding Unbound, preface to the 2nd edition
Preface to Unbound: A Book of AIDS, preface to the Original edition 
Notes

Info autore

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015). 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.

Riassunto

​​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.

Prefazione

REBINDING UNBOUND:

         A Re-introduction to Unbound: A book of AIDS

 

            The bristles rising on the back of your neck, a sense of silent footsteps behind you closing in, the bewildering proliferation of medical terminology, a matrix of conjectural timelines and invisible transmissions: As the COVID-19 pandemic rages around us, building its houses of terror, how could I not recall that other epidemic, unrelenting, ferocious, which wiped out much of my extended (gay) family (among 700,000 other U. S. Americans of every race and several sexual persuasions) — all of them extinguished by the relentless acronym: AIDS.

            My book of essays, poems, and assorted texts, revived here — Unbound: A Book of AIDS — was originally published in 1997, though the writing had begun a decade earlier. Even then life in San Francisco was well-saturated and transformed by the mysterious viral complex. I, too, was saturated and transformed — by loss, by grief, by constant terror, but also by friends who rose to the occasion of their dying newly empowered, with sudden wisdom and unsentimental clarity. Both the horrors and the graces were overwhelming, the more so because I’d begun to feel something like responsibility — to scale the walls surrounding the LGBTQ (especially the G) communities, and raise the alarm to inform the blindfolded citizens that a cataclysmic illness was being visited upon their (especially) fathers, brothers, and sons. It was as if we were living in an actual walled city — community as quarantine? — and no one on the outside could even conceive of the misery or dignity taking place within. Within, the drama was unrelenting, conflicted; even now I can feel the tense unknowingness, the ball and chain attached to test results, the quiet violence of waiting, the agony of joy. It was as if we were living in an opera, except the high-vaulting arias were our everyday talk, and the wrenching love duets our nightly bedside visits with Robert or Jim.

 

I wasn’t (as I originally noted) an authority — neither a scientist nor a sociologist — but I was/I am a poet, perpetually in search of meaning. I let my friends lead me through the thicket of multiplying symptoms, false cures, and assorted revelations. I found that writing about my friends brought our companionship into greater focus, an ancillary treasure to the duty of bearing witness. Decoding speech and analyzing actions — the care embedded in writing, in paying scrupulous attention — laid bare the common bonds, and open hearts, of friendship. The real geniuses among the infected invited their friends in to the zone of approaching death so they might share not the darkness but the awakenings, and return, enlarged, to their previously normal lives.

The corona pandemic! How could we possibly have imagined a second visitation in such a short time, wielding such a similar scythe, and equally propelled by government indifference and neglect? But the COVID -19 virus moves so fast and AIDS moved so slowly! The mark of this pandemic is how boldly the virus strikes, progressing with uncommon speed, often isolating patients at diagnosis, and instantly exiling loved ones to the outer-lands, hurtling the infected from intubation to tombstone in a matter of days. The mark of AIDS was how stealthily it struck, how it grew in a slow desperate progression, often unmaking the body in protracted stages, so that loved ones endured seeing the disfiguration, the withering away, the sleepless eyes trolling the dark. And yet Unbound mainly pursues the other side, where those with the virus have time to meet their mortality, to absorb the unimaginable and give shape and voice to its lessons, to rise above the falling spirit in tender dramas of salvation — or with a cognizant wink restage in full riot the comedy of errors of terrors. These things I’ve witnessed — humble interlocutor in awe before men of such bravery, such creativity, hilarity, willpower, insight, as to outmaneuver the fatal winds and compose their epitaphs in updrafts. Circles of farewells, organized meals by the hour or day, emergency telephone trees or email loops, and rounds of saintly visitors with large ears and soft voices: How lucky we were to be able to display our affection; how grateful to have the luxury of properly saying goodbye.

 

Twenty-five years later, in the middle of this new pandemic, Unbound’s urgent empathy is renewed. The AIDS-inflected stories of purple bodies and haunted places, of plotted memorials and crushing numbers, of indomitability and attitude-in-the-face-of, speak to the corona virus as from an older brother of terror to a younger, one set of grief and struggle reinforcing the other. COVID -19 calls to HIV in mortal consanguinity: two deathtraps at century’s end and century’s beginning, two agitators inflaming the transit zone between life and death, challenging our concepts of health, vulnerability, guilt, religiosity, solitude, security, community, isolation, and hope.

 

There’s a certain naiveté to some of the writing in Unbound, a gloss of innocence: I knew very little about death at the outset, and very much by the end. Is grief itself developmental? I think it grew as my writing grew, found its measure in the cacophony of names and voices, the roll call of implacable fate. I think it grew as the epidemic grew, from the spectral tremors of first encounter, to the reverberations of impossible extent. I think grief took hold as the virus does, lodged deep in the tissues and fluids and blood. Twenty-five years later it resurfaces intact, comprehensive, unwavering: a background, an imminence.

 

Unbound was the instructional medium through which I attempted to integrate the decimations of AIDS; it rubbed out the sting, licked the wounds, and swallowed the venom. I turned to sentences and narrative to participate in stories that made the invisible malevolence concrete, to put it in a human context, a body, a person: my Jackson, my Johnny, my Chuck. HIV wasn’t a grand figure, caped and marauding; it was the daily news, right in your face, grotesquely demotic. Yet as if by collective agreement there would be no common mass graves here; every perished host would be named out loud (see the Names Project, the Bay Area Reporter obits, or the AIDS memorial grove) —  just as the lesbian/gay movement had transitioned from shamed silence to righteous, outspoken rebellion. I learned to act in part as a ventriloquist, through which my infected friends spoke the revelations they wanted to transmit; in part as a scribe, adhering to the malodorous facts; and in part as a writer, seizing on sentences to unknot the congeries of information and emotion, to fold Marshall or Ken into phrases of time and space, and pinch their cheeks to raise the blood and draw them back to a place among the living.                                                                  

Unbound is arranged chronologically and carries some of the detective-like tensions that characterized the early epidemic: the elemental drama of unmasking the virus itself and naming its assault; the grand guignol theater of young men disappearing piece by piece week by week, on the street, at the café, at the gym; the tense narrative progressions of personal struggle and personal reward, of each aching trajectory from hospital to hospice to home.

I’ve added one final piece to the book, written several years after the others but very much a part of the compositional ethos. The Age of AIDS bleeds through running decades. This is the third introduction I’ve written for Unbound, and each iteration casts a different light on what is essentially unfathomable. Grieving, wailing, mourning, missing, weeping, suffering, sighing, crying, seeing, rising, reviving, transcending, overcoming, unbinding, unbending, unbound.

I tried to honor the lives I lost. I tried to make a zone of history quiver. I tried to hold my head above water so I could see farther. I tried to model your tender cheek and the swipe of your neck. I tried to thread idiosyncrasy and predicament and chance to make a day like a day, I tried to hold suspense and find the rhythms of actions and intents. I tried to get out of the way while I was talking, and respect each virus as an adversary, and make the shape of a life discernable — for a moment, at least. I tried to craft a eulogy for a city in time. I tried to make a space where you could unwind your memories, hang them out like linen to dry in the sun, and I hung mine out too, and the air was breathable.

 

“Common measure in homage to fitting company,” says the poem “Human Immune.”

 

Here is Unbound: A Book of AIDS:               

                                                                                                                        
A.S./202

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Aaron Shurin, Shurin Aaron
• Editore: Ingram Publishers Services
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 24.01.2023
• EAN: 9781643621548
• ISBN: 978-1-64362-154-8
• Pagine: 144
• Illustrazioni: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi; LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, Anthologies: general, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / LGBTQ+