Elixir: New and Selected Poems

by Aaron Shurin, Brian Teare (Foreword)

A new and selected collection of poetry from a legend of San Francisco’s literary community.

From the early days of Gay Liberation to innovations in contemporary verse, Aaron Shurin’s has been a singular voice in American poetry. His work has unwaveringly maintained lyric presence while at the same time utilizing narrative tensions and structural constraints—especially in his chosen form of the prose poem. His queer eye has never wavered—yet his has never been a poetry confined to one audience, one mode. Elixir draws from a dozen books over a period of fifty years, presciently investigating issues of gender, homosexuality, identity, and subjectivity, via ecstatic diction, luxurious sound-scape, creative grammar, and radical form.

228 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 8, 2025

About the author

AARON SHURIN is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including the poetry collections Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005), The Paradise of Forms (Talisman House, 1999), a Publishers Weekly Best Book and, the prose collection, Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997). His work has appeared in over twenty national and international anthologies, most recently Nuova Poesia Americana Contemporana (Italy: Oscar Mondadori, 2006). Shurin's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commision, and the Gerbode Foundation. He is Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. "

Reviews

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love it when a book demands study... less difficult poem in your modernism class, more something new is happening that requires me to sit down. so slowgoing, so full, in a way. admittedly the earlier work was appealing insofar as it showed the slow accrual of shurin's style, which i could only describe as the tucking of rhyme in otherwise heaping clauses of sensory detail. i think i associate him most with the sky now, the way his lines open with only subtle parsing. when i read the sentence "*i* have already written like strawberries in spring" something in me shifted forever! i understood it, that slight & ignorable error of writing out of sync.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

But Mama they're fucking me where there are no holes!