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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Into Distances

Aaron Shurin

Digital Edition
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A Sun & Moon title.

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In this, his eighth book of poetry, Aaron Shurin continues to explore the prose-poem format he began in 1984, a form in which he has sought to combine lyric and narrative in a way that reflects in its complexities and contradictions the tension between individual perception and social control; a poetry simultaneously of praise and dislocation.

Shurin's Into Distances both proposes and withdraws narration, intimating events and relationships that the reader is encouraged to connect and fill in. Syntactical play, shifting pronouns, and heightened language keep the "stories" in constant motion as sentences swoop and hesitate under the guide of a fiercely sensual lyric voice. As he has written in his essay Narrativity, Shurin is interested in narration as action, not the thing, "a happening semblance that is and is not a story, a gift given and taken away so that one must finally stand fulfilled by transgression."

Winner of the Gerbode Poetry Award in 1993 and a California Arts Council Literary Fellowship in 1989, Aaron Shurin is currently the associate director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.

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