Citizen

Aaron Shurin

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780872865204
• eBook ISBN: 9780872865600
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Widely acclaimed for his lyrical language and innovative verse, Aaron Shurin brings the prose poem into new richness and complexity in Citizen. Through shape-shifting sentences and sensuous imagery he explores the nuances of civic and domestic life, the twists and turns of desire, and the mysterious shimmer of objects. Traveling across the borders of cities and the boundaries of form, he crafts a dazzling vision of daily life as a citizen of the imagination.

"His writing folds the mundane and the mythic in with deep images of personal archetype. The passing moments in which the poems possessed Shurin are held fresh to the page in a dazzled string of trigger-touches. They hint of lingering spiral passages, personal journeys, which lie just below such occasions."—Patrick Dunagan, The Critical Flame

"Aaron Shurin writes piercingly lovely poetry that's multidimensional and insists on being read aloud, though its eloquence is equally powerful on the page without sound, with that enclosed, attentive ear that can turn poetry into meditation … Shurin's name has been linked with masters like Jorie Graham and Michael Palmer. But his songs have a grace that's his alone."— The Rumpus

"Aaron Shurin, in Citizen, deliriously revels in sensual images, sly wisdom and rumbling pauses. Shurin's brilliant book—his eleventh—suggests how a lengthy career allows a poet the room to roam, stretching the limits of what his poems can be."—K.M. Soehnlein, author of Robin and Ruby

" Citizen 's lyrics are a fine mixture of the crisp and the luxurious if such a combination is possible. With only two or three exceptions, no poem is more than a page long. Things go quickly. The poet gets in, does his work, and gets out. However within that space is a carnival of language, and the reader loves the short wild ride, in part because Shurin revels in the glory of words. He knows they can take us places and entertain, and he allows them to (read: makes them) do both … the whole book, is an embrace of the fantastic."—Dean Rader, The Huffington Post

"Lyrical and sketched with lush strokes of purpose and panache, these densely evocative paragraphs demonstrate a wide range of moods and desires. It would be difficult to find a piece in Shurin's tightly constructed bounty that doesn't reiterate the beauty of his cerebrally-interpreted text, but there are indeed standouts and, conversely, some pages that could possibly rise above the heads of more inexperienced poetry fanatics."— The Bay Area Reporter

"These agile prose poems by Aaron Shurin wander and leap sensually from bed, to lover, to home, to natural wonders, both personal and universal. The individual words of each poem collide and mingle, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes with a purposeful dissonance. Citizen is a lyrical and affirming look into the vibrant life of San Francisco and into the mind of one of its most accomplished poets."— World Literature Today

"In Citizen, Shurin seamlessly tackles many aspects of life. Often in a single poem he weaves themes of love, class, time, poetry, and even good cheese while he simultaneously unravels them with concocted flashes of specificity … Shurin conjures a Steinian grammar and Shakespearean delicacy, but applies his unique spontaneity and logic to create a voice that is solely his."—Maggie Heaps, Eleven Eleven Literary Journal

Aaron Shurin is the author of over ten books, most recently King of Shadows, a collection of personal essays. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Table of contents

• I. Flare
• II. Gather
• III. Hive