The Thirteen Original Sins Jaded

One day, dawn to midnight, an eighteen-year-old set out to empty his whole head onto the page. He did. On March 26, 1998, Shaun J Apple tried to write an entire book in a single day. The Thirteen Original Sins Jaded is that day: thirteen themed poems and one that arrived as a gift at the end, all composed between morning and midnight, all kept in their original, experimental grain. You can hear a poet learning, in real time, that the rules are optional if the truth is intact.
The syntax bends. The textures go strange on purpose. It is young in the way only a first real book can be, and fearless in the same measure. The bonus poem, Ann Brand, remembers a red-haired girl who sat behind him in a driver's-education class, glimpsed once more at a school band function, perhaps only in his mind. It is the soft center of a jagged little book. This is where the experimenting started, preserved as an artifact rather than polished into something it never was.
It is proof of an idea that shaped everything after it: that a book does not have to be careful to be true, and that speed can be its own kind of honesty. For readers of experimental and confessional poetry, and anyone who loves a genuine time capsule: a voice at eighteen, kept intact. A whole book made in a single day, and it still has more nerve than most people manage in a decade.