SWAY (Concise)
Aug 2026 · Masterpiece Editions Book 4 · Love Across Borders Publishing
star
6 reviews
Ebook
220
Pages
Tools
info
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
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.
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,...
Discover more
Ratings and reviews
6 reviews
Emily Daly
- Flag inappropriate
August 16, 2026
The short form gives these poems a startling immediacy. Nothing seems buffered. A fear arrives, a body is vulnerable, love appears beside mortality, and the poem is gone before the reader can protect against it. that speed creates its own kind of intimacy. I kept returning to lines because the compression leaves emotional afterimages. It is spare poetry with a surprisingly large wake.
Natural T
- Flag inappropriate
- Show review history
August 14, 2026
This is compression used beautifully. The shorter form gives every line more pressure, turning love, mortality, time, surgery, and failing sight into something immediate and almost physical. There is very little distance between the experience and the language. SWAY (Concise) feels distilled rather than abbreviated, which is exactly why it lands so hard.
Degoo DanForth
- Flag inappropriate
- Show review history
August 15, 2026
These poems understand how brevity can increase emotional risk. There is nowhere to hide inside a long explanation, so tenderness and fear arrive exposed. A few words can hold a relationship, a body, and the knowledge that time is moving whether anyone is ready or not. I read it quickly and then spent far longer thinking about it.
About the author
Shaun J Apple is an American author, poet, and publisher whose work draws on a life shaped by travel, family, online communities, illness, and change. For more than twenty-five years, he has traveled through nearly one hundred countries, built online communities that reached millions, worked in internet harm reduction, raised a family across continents, and continued creating through Crohn’s disease, PTSD, retinal detachments, and partial vision loss. He founded r/trees and r/gonewild and helped administer Bluelight, one of the internet’s largest harm-reduction communities. His work spans memoir, poetry, philosophy, relationships, politics, travel, humor, and children’s literature, united by a conviction that experience matters, connection is worth protecting, and nobody is disposable. He publishes through Love Across Borders Publishing, the independent house he founded to create a lasting literary record from an impermanent life.
Shaun J Apple is an American author, poet, and publisher whose work draws on a life shaped by travel, family, online communities, illness, and change. For more than twenty-five years, he has traveled through nearly one hundred countries, built online communities that reached millions, worked in i...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
