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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.
Praise for The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems:
" . . . it delightfully explores a melange of containers, frames, and matrices through which a poem can come to life."—Publishers Weekly
"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
Aaron Shurin has published eight books of poetry and one of essays. His selected poems, Paradise of Forms, was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 1999. His essays on AIDS, Unbound, went through several printings with Sun & Moon Press. Since 1999 he has directed the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.