King of Shadows - Softcover

Shurin, Aaron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872864901 ISBN 13: 9780872864900

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2008

Synopsis

Based on the author’s life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin’s coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall.

Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyrics and The Paradise of Forms, named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

About this title

About the Author

Aaron Shurin has published eight books of poetry and one of essays. His selected poems, Paradise of Forms, was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 1999. His essays on AIDS, Unbound, went through several printings with Sun & Moon Press. Since 1999 he has directed the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Reviews

Starred Review. This emotionally potent collection of 20 essays by noted Bay Area poet Shurin (Involuntary Lyrics) begins with a meditation on his fear of birds (of course they're dinosaurs) and coming out in radical UC-Berkeley in the late 1960s. The collection progresses through meditations on how the difference between Shakespeare's Oberon and Puck shaped his identity as a gay man and a poet, and his indebtedness to Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara and Denise Levertov. The accumulation of biographic and literary details conjures up an apparitional dreamscape of a very specific moment in American history—a new sense of personal and literary freedom, a new period of progressive political and literary ideas. Shurin's idiosyncratic style can startle with its imagery and captures a complicated, conflicted relationship to several cultural identities. Describing his anxiety about his looks before going to a bar, he writes oh, my wiry, independent, shtetl hair, my Ukrainian ribbons from my mother's side, folkloric bonnet of curls, was out of the question, way too heavily accented, ruefully unacceptable, untidy, un-Californian.... The author addresses forthrightly the question of AIDS by the end of this book, one of Shurin's best. (June)
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Edition details

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872864901
• ISBN 13: 9780872864900
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 175