Witnessing the illness and death of many of his friends from AIDS, San Francisco poet Aaron Shurin began a series of writings that, as he puts it, "are the stations of an enlarging the question, alarmed, of a cell aroused by invasion, or the yearning curl of a lover's body awake on the vacated sheets."

The startlingly original and provocative book that resulted was not a project but a process of learning about AIDS and its implications through the activity of writing itself. It is, in that context, not a book about AIDS but, growing from Shurin's attempt to understand and reach out to those around him, a book of AIDS.