Unbound

A Book of AIDS

By: Aaron Shurin

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Paperback | 9 January 2023

At a Glance

Paperback
144 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.3 x 13.9 x 1.1

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A moving collection of essays that bring poetic insight to the sheer facts of the AIDS epidemic, in an attempt to make meaning from suffering.

Unbound is a poet's intimate account of life in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s during the apex of the AIDS epidemic. In his search for meaning, Shurin dives down into the broken-hearted, revelatory core of the social landscape and the lives of friends who both succumbed to and transcended the disease. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Unbound continues the search, resonating inescapably with the perils of our new pandemic. Shurin brings to life a familiar world tensed on the threshold of living, balanced precariously on the edges of love and friendship, family and community, rapture and mourning.

Industry Reviews

"'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

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