In an era where poetry often seeks the immediate and the fleeting, Victor Stringer's debut collection, Lingering Light: 80 Poems, published by American Publishers Empire, makes a deliberate stand for the enduring. The collection, released on July 19, 2026, and now available worldwide on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover editions, gathers eighty poems written over roughly twenty years. Stringer, a veteran and father, organizes the work into seven thematic sections that traverse love, loss, childhood, spirituality, travel, identity, and war. Yet, as he notes, the unifying thread is not subject matter but a voice that persistently seeks "something true, something that outlasts the moment it was written in."
The title Lingering Light encapsulates the book's central premise: some feelings do not resolve neatly. They linger in the body, memory, and the quiet hours, waiting to be revisited. This idea resonates throughout the collection, from the opening section on love and romance, where "Being With You" takes readers from Central Park to the Eiffel Tower to a Montego Bay sunset, to the closing poems that confront the harsh realities of war. In "A Young Warrior's Request!," Stringer directly addresses politicians who send young people to fight, capturing the perspective of a soldier who must live with decisions he did not make. This poem, like many others, reflects his military service and his commitment to writing with unflinching honesty.
The collection's emotional range is vast. In the section on loss, "Two Sides of a Broken Heart" depicts a man returning to a beach he once shared with a lost love, holding both halves of a broken heart charm. In contrast, the section on childhood and family offers moments of levity, such as "Daddy, Will You Blow My Chicken," built entirely from the real questions of a three-year-old, including a serious concern about ducks that might speak Spanish. These pieces ground the collection in the ordinary, elevating daily moments to the level of the extraordinary.
Stringer's work also delves into spirituality and philosophical inquiry. "Yogi Time" describes a meditation encounter with a golden light and a voice suggesting there is still work to do. The section on identity asks what remains of a person when the roles of lover, father, soldier, and believer fall away. Throughout, his poetry moves between the confessional and the philosophical, using vivid imagery to explore themes that are personal in origin but universal in reach.
The book's availability across multiple formats, including Kindle and print editions, ensures broad access. For those interested in the author's journey, his official website at victorstringer.com provides further information. The collection is a testament to the power of lingering emotions, offering readers a space to reflect on their own unresolved feelings. As Stringer writes, the book is not built around a single message but around a voice that keeps chasing the same thing across different rooms of a life. In doing so, Lingering Light reminds us that the moments we think are gone often stay with us, waiting to be illuminated again.
