“'The famous San Francisco sun has turned to famous rain.' Only when I began to read Unbound did I realize how much this perspective was missing from our shelves. Aaron Shurin brings his massive command of language, and the history of gay poetics, to this frontline eyewitness account of the specificity of AIDS in San Francisco. The work is frank and authentic, emotionally intentional, and it brings us back to the endless shock of coping with the impossible. We need this work to expand our understanding: of both relevant futures and ungraspable pasts."—Sarah Schulman

"The life and work of poet Aaron Shurin exemplifies a sense of queer, communal possibility. . . . In Unbound, his prose moves between essays that reflect on the possibility of narrating the experience of AIDS to prose poems that seem to embody that experience."—David Grundy, The Poetry Project Newsletter 

"Intimate and rangy, Unbound’s sixteen essays offer not only a nuanced portrait of the AIDS era but also a priceless guide for how to write about catastrophic collective and personal loss."—Elizabeth Hall, Full Stop

“… an unmatched account of life in San Francisco in the 1980s and '90s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Reflective and deeply meaningful, the book offers an intimate glimpse into the nature of a deadly illness and how it directly affected the queer community through the lives of two men depicted with a poet's shimmering prose.”—The Bay Area Reporter

"Unbound is about bringing the past into the present; making it impossible to ignore, and giving people the space to reckon with a legacy of loss. . . In a way, Shurin himself becomes limitless here, able to at once witness and enact his own memorial."—Sam Moore, Tripwire 

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015). His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry to Italy’s Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Preface: Rebinding Unbound

A Re-introduction to Unbound: A Book of AIDS 

Full Circle: Postscript to “City of Men” 

Notes from Under 

The Depositories 

Strips and Streamers 

Further Under 

Orphée: The Kiss of Death 

Turn Around: A Solo Dance with Voice 

A Lull in the Void: Postscript to “Turn Around” 

from The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks 

Human Immune 

My Memorial 

Some Haunting 

Inscribing AIDS: A Reflexive Poetics 

Shifting Paradise 

July 

Generation 

The Dance that We Made 

Appendices: 

Preface: Binding Unbound, preface to the 2nd edition

Preface to Unbound: A Book of AIDS, preface to the Original edition 

Notes