SWAY (Concise)

After eye surgery, the doctors told him to rest his eyes. He made a book instead.

SWAY is the sequence that made the case for Shaun J Apple, and this is its sharpest form: the poems distilled down to the ones that had to stay. If you read one book of his, start here.

The subject is love and time, and the pressure behind it is real. These poems were composed as his sight was going, and you can feel a mind working against a closing window, insisting on tenderness in a world built to keep it distracted. Time keeps turning out to be the thing being worshipped and the thing running out at once.

We love life. But does life love us? ... Time is divine. The real god of I.

The lines start in plain speech and then, without warning, open into an image you keep. Everything is preserved exactly as composed, coinages and fractures included, because in SWAY the precise wording is the feeling. It is the hinge of the whole catalog: the moment a life spent building things for other people turned, under medical pressure, into a life spent making something to leave behind.

The poet behind it founded r/trees and r/gonewild and helped run one of the internet's largest harm-reduction forums before he turned fully to the page. This is where all that attention turned inward.

Readers who come for the story of a man told to rest his eyes stay for the poems, which turn a private emergency into something anyone who has ever loved against the clock will recognize.

For readers of confessional and modern poetry who want emotional writing with a spine, and lines worth underlining and sending at midnight.

Read it in one sitting for the arc, or open it anywhere for a live wire. When you want the rest, the full-length SWAY (Verbose) is waiting.