Aaron Shurin's Elixir: New and Selected Poems, out now from Nightboat—and which follows his Unbound and The Blue Absolute—collects his work at the forefront of publishing, politics, and poetics. From the Gay Poets collective and the Gay Liberation movement, through the San Francisco circles Shurin has belonged to throughout his life (and in which he's been referred to, by Kevin Killian, as a "gay shaman"), here is "a combination of distilled essences found nowhere else in American poetry" (Brian Teare).  The themes are the same throughout: the pulse of a historical lineage, from Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, his beloved…

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