King of Shadows by Aaron Shurin

Abstract

colorado review 184 (Perhaps memory is precise but when the room around a favorite object changes objects seem changed, too . . . Schiff places the objects of this book’s concern in a host of poetic rooms. Each stanza is a new room that relocates the object and the reader amid imagery from Glocks to Botticelli. “Project Paperclip,” and the book too, ends with a litany, counted down from 42 to 1, items categorized manically, ordered masterfully, and, somehow, all memorializing Schiff’s mother’s birth during wwii; the b-29 superfortress; September 11, 2001; and designer Tom Ford. If the Romantics were concerned with the sublime, Schiff is concerned with an idea stranger, darker, and eerily more familiar than the sublime. Revolver constantly reorganizes, reorders , and recategorizes, clicking chamber to chamber, even within the space of a single poem, a single stanza. These juxtapositions , these chambers, the bullet of the poem—unlikely and complex—house meanings beautiful, putrid, funny, violent , tender, matrimonial, and martial, and the world thereby is made strange and wonderful. Ad infinitum. King of Shadows, by Aaron Shurin City Lights Books, 2008 reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson Aaron Shurin’s new book of creative nonfiction, King of Shadows , is animated by an infectious enthusiasm. I use “enthusiasm ” here as something of a technical term, referring to its etymology from the Greek enthousiasmos, which means “having a god within” or being inspired. Rather than a single overriding source of inspiration, however, the essays in this book draw inspiration from several enlivening sources, and their humor, drama, curiosity, and pleasure linger with the reader well after the reading is done. 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. Note the “rapture of CRSP09 nonfiction.indd 184 1/30/2009 12:55:50 PM 185 Book Notes taxonomy and parental devotion” that suffuses his description of a garden where he was house-sitting: the stalwart artichoke opened its crustacean leaves into a livid heaving crown of scintillating blue, enrapturing the bees who grazed inside the oversized bloom as if it were a meadow; the strawberries dropped their hot, sweet hearts into my hands by the cupful . . . The landscape here, and elsewhere, veritably comes to life. 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. One of the great merits of this book is that it nourishes the reader with that refreshment, delight, so lacking in much of our self-consciously sober contemporary writing. That’s not to say, of course, that this collection is made up entirely of essays that celebrate simple pleasures such as those proffered by a summer garden. Shurin’s project has its social, historical, and literary aspects as well, and he’s an astute and entertaining chronicler of queer life, starting with his own youth in the title essay, “King of Shadows.” Here Shurin relates his own coming out, noting how, as a teen, “sissy sensibility gave nuance to my bearing” gratifying adults “who misperceived me enthusiastically as ‘a little gentleman.’” It’s in many ways a lighthearted account that employs Shurin’s high school drama career as a means of showing that he was never to be Oberon, but was rather to be Puck. Yet in the playing of the part, a deeper and more complex knowledge begins to emerge, for in the tension of performance “one experiences in the body’s echo chamber the language of all the roles.” Later in the book, Shurin’s queer experience becomes linked with the story of his chosen habitat, San Francisco, gay haven, “balm for a wound and the wound’s own inflamer,” as he narrates his entry into the world of bars and sex. Treating his youthful naiveté and eagerness with self-deprecating humor, Shurin nonetheless makes clear that his late sixties forays into bar life were “surrounded by real not imaginary terrors.” This apprehension makes the narrative all the more poignant as Shurin and his peers find an almost-normalcy together. In another...