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Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose. He has been a central member of the San Francisco Bay Area writing community for half a century, having taught a generation of poets at universities throughout the city. A graduate himself of the storied Poetics Program at the New College of California, he is a professor emeritus and former director of the MFA Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Shurin has been a pioneer in LGBTQ studies and in contemporary innovative poetry, challenging fixed notions of gender and sexual identity, lyricism and narrativity, the structure of verse, and for forty years, in language both lush and colloquial, he has pioneered the resurgence of the prose poem as a critical modern art form.
“Once again, Aaron Shurin proves to be one of America’s greatest poets. The Blue Absolute is a lesson in how to write prose poems that sway, tilt, shiver, quake, torque, pulse, thunder, and dance. Aboard the vessel of this form, Shurin sails behind, in, and under the sensual dimensions of joy and grief, love and loss, youth and age, sex and death. In the end, this book teaches us how to feed our ‘beautiful naked grief’ to song so that we may live indomitably.” —Craig Santos Perez, in praise of The Blue Absolute
