Life is food, and food feeds life. This is a book about the appetite for all of it. LIT is the loosest book in the catalog, and it means to be. It moves the way a long, half-drunk conversation moves, from a joke to a grief to a craving and back, insisting the whole time that none of it matters and all of it matters at once. Taste is the organizing appetite: for food, for music, for another body, for more time.
Mortality is the seasoning under everything. The poems refuse good taste on purpose, because good taste would flatten the exact thing they are trying to hold. I am alive in this song. I am dead without it. It is crude where it needs to be, tender where you do not expect it, and preserved precisely as composed. Shaun J Apple has lived across roughly 100 countries and composes with chronic illness that makes appetite its own kind of stakes.
LIT is what it sounds like when a body that does not get easy days decides to enjoy the one it has. It treats a good meal, a good song, and a hard truth as the same event, because in a body running out of time, they are. For readers who like their poetry unfiltered, funny, and unafraid. Read it hungry. It is the book to bring to the person who thinks poetry is supposed to be polite.
Life is food, and food feeds life. This is a book about the appetite for all of it. LIT is the loosest book in the catalog, and it means to be. It moves the way a long, half-drunk conversation moves, from a joke to a grief to a craving and back, insisting the whole time that none of it matters and all of it matters at once. Taste is the organizing appetite: for food, for music, for another body, for more time.
Mortality is the seasoning under everything. The poems refuse good taste on purpose, because good taste would flatten the exact thing they are trying to hold. I am alive in this song. I am dead without it. It is crude where it needs to be, tender where you do not expect it, and preserved precisely as composed. Shaun J Apple has lived across roughly 100 countries and composes with chronic illness that makes appetite its own kind of stakes.
LIT is what it sounds like when a body that does not get easy days decides to enjoy the one it has. It treats a good meal, a good song, and a hard truth as the same event, because in a body running out of time, they are. For readers who like their poetry unfiltered, funny, and unafraid. Read it hungry. It is the book to bring to the person who thinks poetry is supposed to be polite.