Based on the author’s life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin’s coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall.
Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyrics and The Paradise of Forms, named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.
This emotionally potent collection of 20 essays by noted Bay Area poet Shurin (Involuntary Lyrics) begins with a meditation on his fear of birds ("of coursethey're dinosaurs") and coming out in radical UC-Berkeley in the late 1960s. The collection progresses through meditations on how the difference between Shakespeare's Oberon and Puck shaped his identity as a gay man and a poet, and his indebtedness to Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara and Denise Levertov. The accumulation of biographic and literary details conjures up an apparitional dreamscape of a very specific moment in American history—a new sense of personal and literary freedom, a new period of progressive political and literary ideas. Shurin's idiosyncratic style can startle with its imagery and captures a complicated, conflicted relationship to several cultural identities. Describing his anxiety about his looks before going to a bar, he writes "oh, my wiry, independent, shtetl hair, my Ukrainian ribbons from my mother's side, folkloric bonnet of curls, was out of the question, way too heavily accented, ruefully unacceptable, untidy, un-Californian...." The author addresses forthrightly the question of AIDS by the end of this book, one of Shurin's best. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.The Shrine 9
Reciprocity 17
Along the Way 23
Geomancy 31
King of Shadows 35
Perching 55
Morning in the Valley 59
Three Scenes from the Sauna at the YMCA 65
Blue in Gray 69
A Discovery 73
The People's P***k 77
Dahlias 91
Reading in Time/Reading in Place 97
Composed 105
Abattoir 109
The Dancers 115
Avatar 125
In the Bars of Heaven and Hell 131
Hush 157
The Dance That We Made 159
The Immediate Local 169
Notes 173
Overview
Based on the author’s life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin’s coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ...