Blue Absolute

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.

"The poems in The Blue Absolute are liberating in the way they lean toward sky, breaking ceilings and conjuring the absolute richness of the moment. Shurin is a bright voice in the wilderness, one that illuminates and builds worlds with words."—Scott Neuffer, Shelf Awareness"The collection is offered in four parts; the last, 'Shiver,' is dedicated 'for San Francisco.' […] Reading it is as simple as tackling prose, but there’s poetic sparkle and daring in it, as in all the pieces in the collection, the abstract melting into the particular."—Roberto Friedman, Bay Area Reporter"The Blue Absolute has choreographic electricity that dances skin-to-skin and mingles senses in ways that would surely please Allen Ginsberg and other Beats who knew their Shakespeare, their Rabelais, and their Zen."—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus"The Blue Absolute‘s sonic felicity binds each page to a common score which draws from song its deep notes, an encompassing melopoeia that subtends the whole. Whether held in a knot of anguish or bliss, whether echoing hollow nights or breathing along pelicans, wind, trees, and storms, the poem will always tilt toward an upper limit, melody, which is its own kind of transcending 'shiver.'—Chris Tysh, Fence Digital"The poems are atmospheric, effervescent, totally enchanting. A cinematic light sweeps throughout this book of prose poems."—Holly Mason, The University of Arizona's Poetry Center Blog"In March, Aaron Shurin’s new book, The Blue Absolute, was just arriving in bookstores as they were closing down. I met Aaron on Divisadero St. to pick up two copies. The Blue Absolute reads to me as a trembling, elaborated, and vulnerable shape of life in San Francisco in the last few decades—the time Aaron has lived here, very active in teaching and poetry (this is his 14th book), remembering 'the joy of the torque of the wind, with my hair flying' and the torques of grief, the previous pandemic, aging, evictions. He thanks his publishers, Nightboat, for their indomitability. I thank him for his."—Hazel White, Periodicities"Shurin’s prose poems lend themselves to the dreamlike fluidity frequent in the genre. They are conversational and often elliptical. The line of flight drives the speaker across the page sometimes into metamorphosis and sometimes across objective correlatives. The elegance of these shifts and leaps provide a conceptual rhythm that is consistent throughout the collection, revealing the poet’s steady hand and sure craft. But delightfully—and seriously—the work permits complexity and acknowledges imperfection within the subjects."—Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Your Impossible Voice"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