Black Roses

WE ARE SHIPPING
A small edition of 80. As of February 6, we have eighteen of these left.

We are pleased to offer this suite of poems by one of our most cherished and innovative lyric poets Aaron Shurin. This limited edition hand sewn chapbook is designed very much for collectors and admirers of Aaron's long career as a poet and mimics some of the design choices of his 1978 chapbook "Toot Suite."

I wanted to be a poet to validate my loss. I wanted to feel how generosity feels and know the satisfaction of melodious speech or melodious text, and feel the surprise of a couplet’s close and bow my head to the patrol of grammar and the glorious missile of syntax.

These ten prose poems circle around mortality, regret, and endings, but through them all is that ever present desire and lust for the fullness that is the world and our bodies, even as they slowly disappear.  Shurin's approach stays maximalist, lush, caught in the beauty of sound and song.

You could say I was here emphatically, lived independently, loved precariously, loved maniacally, loved diversely, lived instinctively, loved decisively, lived multifariously. Then who is the shadowy person addressing the mirror?

It has been among our greatest honors as a small press to publish this innovator of gay poetics and this chapbook will be a welcome addition to anyone's Shurin collection.