Unbound

Intimate and rangy, Unbound’s sixteen essays offer not only a nuanced portrait of the AIDS era but also a priceless guide for how to write about catastrophic collective and personal loss.

Unbound is about bringing the past into the present; making it impossible to ignore, and giving people the space to reckon with a legacy of loss. . . In a way, Shurin himself becomes limitless here, able to at once witness and enact his own memorial.

The life and work of poet Aaron Shurin exemplifies a sense of queer, communal possibility. . . . In Unbound, his prose moves between essays that reflect on the possibility of narrating the experience of AIDS to prose poems that seem to embody that experience.