1990's
A01=Aaron Shurin
aging
AIDS
Author_Aaron Shurin
Category=DC
Category=FXL
Category=JBSD
dying
elegy
end-of-life
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
eq_society-politics
gay
Gay Liberation
gentrification
grief
Harvey Milk
loss
prose poem
San Francisco
Selected Poems
Tales of the City
The Castro
Product details
- ISBN 9781643622767
- Dimensions: 127 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Nightboat Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
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.
