Victor Stringer's debut poetry collection, Lingering Light: 80 Poems, published by American Publishers Empire on July 19, 2026, is now available worldwide on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover editions. The collection, which gathers eighty poems written over two decades, is not built around a single message but around a consistent voice that moves between the confessional and the philosophical, returning again and again to the idea that ordinary moments—a first kiss, a child's question, a night on a battlefield—deserve the same attention as extraordinary ones.
The book's title encapsulates its core theme: some feelings do not leave when the moment passes. They linger in the body, in memory, and in the quiet hours, waiting to be revisited. Stringer, a poet, veteran, and father, draws on his spiritual searching, military service, romantic love and loss, and the experience of raising children to craft poems that are personal in origin but universal in reach.
The collection is organized into seven thematic sections. Love & Romance opens with poems of desire and intimacy, including "Being With You," which traverses Central Park, the Eiffel Tower, and a Montego Bay sunset in search of what it means to belong completely to another person. Loss, Heartbreak & Emotional Darkness follows, unafraid to sit with love's aftermath; in "Two Sides of a Broken Heart," a man returns to a beach he once shared with a lost love, still holding the two halves of a broken heart charm.
Turning to fatherhood, Childhood, Family & Innocence captures the unfiltered moments of raising young children. "Daddy, Will You Blow My Chicken" is built entirely from the real questions and requests of a three-year-old, from "Where does the moon hide during the day?" to a serious concern about ducks that might speak Spanish. Spirituality, Reflection & Inner Peace slows the pace; in "Yogi Time," a meditation session in the woods becomes an encounter with a golden light and a voice that says there is still work to be done.
Journey, Memory & Place uses travel and landscape to process what cannot always be said directly, while Identity, Existence & Philosophical Questions asks what a self is and what remains when the roles of lover, father, soldier, and believer fall away. The collection's most difficult stretch, War, Struggle & Warrior Energy, includes "A Young Warrior's Request!," a poem addressed directly to politicians who send young people to fight, written from the perspective of someone on the ground living with a decision he did not make.
A final section of shorter, lighter pieces, including "Irish Dancer" and "A Pirate's Life for Me," closes the collection, proving that even a book built on hard-won honesty has room for play.
Stringer has said the throughline of the collection is honesty—an insistence on writing what actually happened or what it actually felt like, rather than what would sound impressive on the page. The book is available on Amazon worldwide, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. For more information, visit https://victorstringer.com/.
