Elixir: New and Selected Poems
A new and selected collection of poetry from a legend of San Francisco’s literary community.
Poetry
$6.49 – $17.21Price range: $6.49 through $17.21
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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 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.
Featuring a foreword by Brian Teare.
Praise
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
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Details
ISBN: 9781643622767
Paperback, 240 pages, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Reviews
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.
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. His poetry is liberating on so many levels because he has already done all of the hard work of digging up all those images and feelings and cataloguing what it means to live an authentic and full life.
An utter gem . . . Like loose threads hanging on the backside of a tapestry, Shurin’s poems are interconnected and constellated.
I felt so strongly the feeling that the poem was a provocation . . . I thought my heart might stop.
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