Based on the author's life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadowsis a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin's coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall.

Aaron Shurinis the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyricsand The Paradise of Forms, named a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of the Year.

"This emotionally potent collection of 20 essays by noted Bay Area poet Shurin (Involuntary Lyrics) begins with a meditation on his fear of birds ('of course they're dinosaurs') and coming out in radical UC-Berkeley in the late 1960s. The collection progresses through meditations on how the difference between Shakespeare's Oberon and Puck shaped his identity as a gay man and a poet, and his indebtedness to Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara and Denise Levertov. The accumulation of biographic and literary details conjures up an apparitional dreamscape of a very specific moment in American history — a new sense of personal and literary freedom, a new period of progressive political and literary ideas. Shurin's idiosyncratic style can startle with its imagery and captures a complicated, conflicted relationship to several cultural identities. Describing his anxiety about his looks before going to a bar, he writes 'oh, my wiry, independent, shtetl hair, my Ukrainian ribbons from my mother's side, folkloric bonnet of curls, was out of the question, way too heavily accented, ruefully unacceptable, untidy, un-Californian....' The author addresses forthrightly the question of AIDS by the end of this book, one of Shurin's best. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Shurin has collected 21 essays, most previously published, that describe and celebrate his life as a poet and gay man in San Francisco since the 1960s. The title essay recounts his awakening into both worlds during high school. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

“An astonishing precision of language pervades these twenty-one portraits of a mind’s intercourse with the world…Cherishing the complex specificities of language and experience is clearly Shurin’s ambition and creed. In King of Shadows, he brilliantly succeeds.” Lambda Book Report, Fall 2008

"Shurin's nonfiction writing owes much to his shared vocation as a poet, so lushness of language and a honed attention permeate each of the pieces in this book . . . I was practically sniffing the page to capture the essence of the sweet pea that Shurin promised would send tendrils up my hand if I let it hang still for too long."--Elizabeth Robinson, Colorado Review