Unbound

​​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.

A Re-introduction to Unbound: A Book of AIDS 

Full Circle: Postscript to “City of Men” 

Notes from Under 

The Depositories 

Strips and Streamers 

Further Under 

Orphée: The Kiss of Death 

Turn Around: A Solo Dance with Voice 

A Lull in the Void: Postscript to “Turn Around” 

from The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks 

Human Immune 

My Memorial 

Some Haunting 

Inscribing AIDS: A Reflexive Poetics 

Shifting Paradise 

July 

Generation 

The Dance that We Made 

Appendices: 

Preface: Binding Unbound, preface to the 2nd edition

Preface to Unbound: A Book of AIDS, preface to the Original edition 

Notes