The Blue Absolute

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.

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.

Click here to read Aaron Shurin in conversation with Micah Ballard!

“San Francisco! […] it saved my life and it made my life. I have both the city of wild imagination from the ’70s and ’80s and today’s city of homelessness and high-rises.”

The Blue Absolute featured in Entropy’s February & March Small Press List! Click here to read.

It’s a gift of art that poetry doesn’t merely recapitulate experience, it creates experience. It’s not reportage, it’s making. It makes sense, it makes music, it makes meaning. I came to “Shiver” in a turmoil of conflicted feelings about the city, which had shifted from paradisiacal to problematic, beset by homelessness on one side and greed on the other. With its broadened perspective on history and time, the poem widened my view, strengthened my acceptance, and made peace.

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.”

The poems are atmospheric, effervescent, totally enchanting. A cinematic light sweeps throughout this book of prose poems.

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.

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.