The Blue Absolute, Paperback

The Blue Absolute's prose poems are hot boxes of lyrical language combusting with daily life. Shurin's sentences turn and leap in a continual shift of perspective and action -- urban and pastoral, highly figured or fragmented, grieving and dreaming -- each poem a compressed but fluid zone of almost psychedelic intensity.

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (2015), Citizen and King of Shadows. His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry to Italy's Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. A longtime educator, he's the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.