My thoughts exactly

King of Shadows by Aaron Shurin; City Lights, $16.95

New York City may be home to more than a few brand-name powerhouse publishers, but San Francisco is graced with a glittering stable of multi-faceted poets and writers. One of our best local shining stars is Aaron Shurin, an impressive, prolific, home-based talent whose latest collection of essays is his best work to date. Drawing on his experience as a gay man living and writing in San Francisco, these 21 pieces range from emotionally-charged reflections to more humorous and whimsical thoughts on the Bay Area at large.

Some readers are likely to relate to Shurin's ruminations on life as a student in Berkeley during that LSD-hazed 1960s Summer of Love era. Others will appreciate his meticulously descriptive attention to the flora and fauna surrounding a sublet in Marin he took one summer ("I could have rolled in those apricot roses — if not for the thorns"), his youth spent cultivating a distinctive love for poetry and theatre (much to his mother's dismay), and a unique blend of observance and admiration for all that is pure and natural within the environs of San Francisco.

Because he is a skilled wordsmith, Shurin's sentences flow like poetry. Each sentence seems to be carefully constructed, as if the author pondered his word selections painstakingly, only to polish them further still on other revisions. Yet for all of his literary spit-shining, Shurin retains a sense of humor that permeates many of his pieces. A footsy-playing football player has a "penis face" ("tight, membranous skin and swollen muscularity"); scenes from a YMCA steam room translate as droll yet strangely poignant; the author's curious caf� conversation with gifted local novelist Karl Soehnlein — all these pieces have humorist potential, but only in the sense that they are representative of the human condition, in all its awkward absurdity.

He nods appreciatively to Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, and Denise Levertov, three poets who, each in their own way, helped shape his craft and foster his artistic individuality. In one essay, Shurin admits that as AIDS began ravaging the city in the 1980s, "seizing the territory of both action and imagination," he felt overwhelmed, but he managed to write a book about the subject some 10 years later. The collection ends somberly with Shurin's delicate text written for a dance about AIDS.

King of Shadows may be a small, compact book, but it's immensely durable in prose, substance, and feeling.