With Involuntary Lyrics, we see Aaron Shurin again at the vanguard of lyric eloquence and ethical rigor as he audaciously uses one of the seminal sonnet sequences in the history of English love poetry to extend the limits of current innovative practice. Shurin's position-the sharply etched immediacy of his experience-is unabashedly that of a sexually active gay man in contemporary America, yet-and, in fact, because of-the exactitude of his insights into this subject matter, the risks and revelations of his vision extend our own sense of what it means to be human. His deft reflections show us how much the involuntary expression of language is suffused with cultural intent, how much the rhythms of the past permeate the present-and how many lost friends, lovers, opportunities, can be heard in the music of the current moment, if we listen with the kind of lyric attention that Shurin brings to language. Formally, the poems in Involuntary Lyrics press every aspect of poem's surface tensions into the service of a music that extends our appreciation of the ways a poem can mean. Shurin shifts between the taut and the tangential in his elastic use of the line, but always deploying to full advantage the line's end as fulcrum to catch the shifting center within every poetic proposition. Because Shurin uses the end words from Shakespeare's sonnets, the cadence of these poems is charged with an elegiac longing, a classical resonance that only heightens the power of Shurin's socially conscious, subversively sensual subject matter. At each line's turn, Shurin balances the trace memory of poetic history against the charged physicality of contemporary event.

Praise for Involuntary Lyrics

“The very first page is so strong it nearly took my head off[…]
“Do you know that experience where you sit down with a new CD & understand within its first few bars that your whole idea of music needs to change? Or where you go to the cinema and realize that your idea of what film can be is about to be transformed completely even after just the first few frames of whatever great movie? That was how I felt reading this first poem, entitled “I” – the numeral, not the letter – the first of 80-some sonnets gathered together in Aaron Shurin’s brand new Involuntary Lyrics, just out from Rusty Morrison’s Omnidawn Press. This is not the first time that a book by Shurin has filled me with awe, even envy. […]
“Returning to verse form after 15 years of prose poetry, Shurin has given us a book as dense as & more faceted than, say, Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. It is not merely a masterwork, but the evolution of a confident & still growing, ever questing imagination never content to settle for whatever he’s done before. I am so friggin’ jealous that it’s obscene!”
--Ron Silliman
To go to the complete review on the Ron Silliman blog, click here.

“Were a line of Shurin's poetry a pirate's plank, the condemned could never guess the paces remaining before their inevitable plummet: these are poems whose lines swing out only to curve back, replacing air with another foothold. Yet regardless of how they race or meander, some anchor always governs, be it form's faint dictate—each poem contains 14 lines—or that "each 'Involuntary Lyric' ends its lines with the same words as a correspondingly numbered Shakespeare sonnet," as Shurin reveals in "A Foot Note." While Shakespeare may be one of the heavyweights preventing this collection from drifting too far out of the San Francisco Bay, other imperatives also intervene, "ordering / quotidian life according to compulsions": desire between men, AIDS, aging, job security and literary influences from Whitman to Proust to Burroughs. Ultimately, the poems contain all unspent desire, for "Composition / deems none / such interruption permissible," favoring attention to the present moment of writing over distracted action. The resultant surplus of kinetic energy explodes in a theatrical flourish of exclamation—"'Just tell them what I have seen!'"—as often as it opts for objectivity and to "ride / permutations without disdain / to meet another face / of mine." Indeed, in this confessional intervention into language poetry, readers may note how the many "vagrant eyes" shift into the singular, leaving the poet center-stage.”
--Publishers Weekly Online

“In Involuntary Lyrics, there's an ease about the poems, as though Shurin's opened up his forms to let a breeze in….  full of modern sensibilities, yet with that thread to the past clearly visible: tense, taut, fully alive with the sound of "now."  ”
--Mark Mardon, The Bay Area Reporter, April 2006
For the complete review click here.

The delight in eye- and ear-catching turns of phrase reminded me perhaps of John Berryman's Dream Songs more than anything else. This delight, like Berryman's, is just as present when dealing with a tragic subject, rendering it all the more convincing [Š]
Involuntary Lyrics is a timely collection from a distinguished poet, well worth exploring.
--Ian Seed, Stride Magazine, United Kingdom