King of Shadows

Front Cover
City Lights Publishers, Apr 28, 2008 - 184 pages

King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays chronicling the author's gay life and life as a poet in San Francisco since the 1960s. In the title essay, Shurin describes his coming into poetry and gay identity via a high-school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Other essays tell of his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and the influence of the sexual politics of the '70s. In "The Bars of Heaven and Hell," we are given a personal history of venturing into gay bars in pre-Stonewall San Francisco. Written in a lyrical, literary, yet highly personal style, Shurin's intelligent and insightful essays circle in and around issues of identity and sensibility, and how our interior and public lives are shaped by them.

Praise for King of Shadows:

"There are lots of reasons you want to read this book. Among them: because there are quite a lot of astonishingly apt and incisive and occasionally uproarious descriptions of the subtleties of everyday life; because many of the sentences are also as perfect as English allows; because it's a wonderfully wry and roundabout guide to gay and literary San Francisco; because you actually do need to know how a person is like a flower and a flower like a person; because it also dowses for and find unexpected pleasures that we particularly need at this moment in time." – Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows, and Hope in the Dark.

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Contents

Reciprocity
17
Three Scenes from the Sauna
65
A Discovery
73
Copyright

8 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

Aaron Shurin arms audience avatar ballet began Berkeley bloom blue body café circle clouds Coleridge dahlia dance Denise Levertov Directions Publishing Corp door dream edge eyes face feel feet fingers fish flower frame friends gay bar gay shame gray green hair hand head heart Human Be-In imagination inside Jack Spicer King of Shadows knew language lean letter light look Marshall's Michael Palmer mindstream morning move narrative never night Oberon park person pink pleasure poem poetic poetry political Puck remember Rendezvous Robert Duncan Robert Glück San Francisco sense shift Sky panels slipper smile space street summer Susan tell tender There's things thought tion tree turkey vulture turned Uliana Lopatkina walk wall watched wild William Carlos Williams wind writing Xanadu yellow

About the author (2008)

AARON SHURIN is the author of eleven books, including the poetry collections Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Paradise of Forms (Talisman House, 1999), a Publishers Weekly Best Book; the prose collection Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997); and most recently, King of Shadows, a collection of personal essays, published by City Lights Books in 2008. His work has appeared in over thirty national and international anthologies, and been translated into seven languagesShurin's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. He is a Professor in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Bibliographic information

TitleKing of Shadows
AuthorAaron Shurin
PublisherCity Lights Publishers, 2008
ISBN0872864901, 9780872864900
Length184 pages
  
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