King of Shadows

Shurin, Aaron. "King of Shadows", City Lights, 2008. Autobiographical Essays Amos Lassen "King of Shadows" is a book of personal essays written in the first person by Aaron Shurin and each is fascinating. They tell of Shurin's living in San Francisco and his reminiscences as a poet, The book is s a look at the life of a gay men who lives openly and who has no fear nor regard for homophobia. Shurin begins with an essay that is a meditation on his fear of birds and moves onto what it was like coming out in Berkeley during the radical 60s. His meditations are what pulls the reader in and they are filled with literary and biographical details that show us a period of American history and a new idea of freedom. Shurin's style is full of passion and imagery and read poetically. His essay on the gay bars of San Francisco gay bars will make you remember your first time. Shurin is a poet but his prose is wonderful once you settle in. Even though what Shurin writes is personal, it is also somewhat universal, He writes beautifully and he recreates an era that was torn apart with the advent of AIDS. This is the kind of book that can be read and reread and then read again and again. It is not only what he writes about but how he writes about that makes this book so special.

KING OF SHADOWS shows that the "love child of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov" hasn't lost any of his touch after decades of work as one of San Francisco's leading poets. His ease with prose is amazing, though it is not for everybody, and some of the measured, musical sentences are richer and slower than anything in the last ten or twenty City Lights Books, but otherwise it is an inspired match of poet and publisher. The brilliant title piece takes the form of an autobiographical collage which sees our hero trying out for a production of A MIDSUMMERS NIGHT DREAM at Beverly Hills High in the spring of 1965; hoping to audition for Oberon, he is startled to find the director thinks of him as more the Puck type. In another panel he visits a newsstand and as casually as possible buys a few treasures: suggestive physique mags, posing straps strained to the last denier. What's startling is his description of himself as a 17 year old, and how closely it resembles his look today. "If you look at me in photos of this period, my body is delicately thin, my impish nose turned-up, my cheekbones high, my Mongol eyes slanted upwards mischievously, my small ears bat-like and similarly alert." Well, he must have a picture of himself in the Anne Frank annex of his home, a portrait aging and crackling with affect, for he is famous for looking exactly as he did twenty, thirty years ago. It is a book of personal essays, in which various aspects of the first person narrative are given a workout. Shurin had led such an interesting a diverse life that he can afford to shrink whole universes of experience in a single page, if that is the way the piece wants to go. In another writer's hands, the discovery that one's father has gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars might have been swollen to a whole book; here it is the spur to a larger discovery about poetry's efficacy. No one has written better of the "sweet, communal" spirit that still abides in San Francisco, and no one has with more accuracy captured the horror of an era stabbed and mutilated by the spear of AIDS. And always he takes the long view, which is a gift beyond all others. Look at the beautiful cover of his book, all the glamour and electricity of a city teeming with mortals, and then above, the strange, older, haunted stars watching all our mistakes without judgment or moral.

San Francisco is known for its large gay community, and "King of Shadows" is one gay man's reminiscence upon living in the city as a poet. With twenty one essays, each heartfelt, personal, and filled with emotion, "King of Shadows" is a clear look into a life lived out in the open, unafraid of society's homophobia. A strong pick for any personal, academic, or community library gay studies collection.