Elixir

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.

"Across the decades, the enduring thread in Shurin’s poetry has been an unwavering attention to beauty—and to the act of creating it. Through the poem, the world is made anew."—Tiff Dressen, Los Angeles Review of Books"Aaron renews our faith in others and in ourselves, in what we see and what we feel, how we love and how that love is an art in and of itself. We learn of endless possibilities as wide and far-reaching as the sky itself."—Anthony Zedan, Foglifter“Once again, Aaron Shurin proves to be one of America’s greatest poets.”—Craig Santos Perez“[A] conversion to the heart of what speech and song mean to be that is the true voice Poetry waits for.”—Robert Duncan“This is what an active poetry can do, then, make something in mind be there—not just talked about and forgotten.”—Robert Creeley"[Shurin’s] has never been a poetry of uncomplicated self-expression, but a poetry that seeks both to embody and to incite transformation . . . An important addition to and revision of the canon of American poetry.”—Reginald Shepherd“What we have here is a bounty of controlled ripeness, elastic and kinetic . . . These poems . . . pull and draw, in an almost chemical/medicinal way, toward a more expansive understanding of how language translates seeing and feeling.”—Barbara Berman"An utter gem . . . Like loose threads hanging on the backside of a tapestry, Shurin’s poems are interconnected and constellated."—Timothy Liu, Plume"I felt so strongly the feeling that the poem was a provocation . . . I thought my heart might stop."—Ryan-Ashley Anderson, Pool Party