Nightboat Books, paperback
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Publisher Marketing: 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.
