“Lingering Light” Spotlights Love, Loss, War, and the Search for Meaning in Victor Stringer’s Debut Collection

The collection takes its name from a simple idea: some feelings do not leave when the moment does. They stay, they resurface, they linger.

“What unifies this collection is not one subject. It is a voice that keeps chasing the same thing across very different rooms of a life: something true, something that outlasts the moment it was written in.”
—Victor Stringer

SIGNAL HILL, CA, August 19, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ — Author and poet Victor Stringer has released his debut collection, Lingering Light: 80 Poems, published by American Publishers Empire. The book was published on July-19-2026 and is now available worldwide on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover editions.

Lingering Light gathers eighty poems written across roughly twenty years, organized into seven thematic sections. Stringer has said the book was never built around a single message. Instead, it was built around a single voice, one that moves between the confessional and the philosophical, and returns again and again to the idea that the ordinary moments of a life, a first kiss, a child’s question, a night on a battlefield, deserve the same attention usually reserved for the extraordinary ones.

About the Book:
Lingering Light is a full-length poetry collection that resists a single genre label. Some poems are romantic. Others are confessional, political, spiritual, or built almost entirely out of a child’s dinner-table questions. Stringer has said the throughline is not subject matter but 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’s title comes from its closing themes: the idea that certain feelings do not resolve neatly. They linger in the body, in memory, in the quiet hours between one day and the next, waiting for us to be ready to look at them again.

The Seven Landscapes of the Collection:
Love & Romance opens the book with poems of desire, intimacy, and longing, including “Being With You,” a poem that moves through Central Park, the Eiffel Tower, and a sunset in Montego Bay in search of a single feeling: what it is like to belong completely to another person.

Loss, Heartbreak & Emotional Darkness follows close behind, unafraid to sit with what love leaves in its wake. In “Two Sides of a Broken Heart,” a man returns again and again to a beach he once shared with someone who is gone, still holding both halves of a broken heart charm long after the relationship ended.

Childhood, Family & Innocence turns toward fatherhood, gathering the small, unfiltered moments that make up a life with young children. “Daddy, Will You Blow My Chicken” is built entirely from the real questions and requests of a child who just turned three, from “Where does the moon hide during the day?” to a very serious concern about ducks that might speak Spanish.

Spirituality, Reflection & Inner Peace slows the book down. In “Yogi Time,” a meditation session in the woods becomes an encounter with something larger, a golden light, a sense of presence, a voice that says there is still work left to do before the poet can come home.

Journey, Memory & Place carries readers through beaches, deserts, and foreign cities, using travel and landscape as a way of processing what cannot always be said directly.

Identity, Existence & Philosophical Questions steps back further still, asking what a self even is, and what remains of a person once the roles they have played (lover, father, soldier, believer) fall away.

War, Struggle & Warrior Energy closes the book’s most difficult stretch with poems written from inside a soldier’s experience. “A Young Warrior’s Request!” is addressed directly to the politicians who send young people to fight, written from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to live with a decision he did not make.

A final section of shorter, lighter, and more experimental pieces closes the collection, including “Irish Dancer” and “A Pirate’s Life for Me,” proof that even a book built on hard-won honesty has room for play.

About the Author:
Victor Stringer is a poet, veteran, and devoted father whose work draws on spiritual searching, military service, romantic love and loss, and the experience of raising children. His poetry moves between the confessional and the philosophical, using vivid imagery and emotional honesty to explore themes that are personal in origin and universal in reach.

Availability:
Lingering Light: 80 Poems is available now on Amazon worldwide, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other international marketplaces.

The book is available in the following formats:
Kindle
Paperback (ISBN: 9781971232577)
Hardcover (ISBN: 9781971232584)
Amazon Buy Link: https://a.co/d/0dZ6e3XN

Media Engagement and Book Inquiries:
For press inquiries, interviews, or more information about Lingering Light, please contact:
American Publishers Empire
vrcamelot@aol.com
(562) 230-1238
https://victorstringer.com/

Social Media Platforms:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victorstringerpoet/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/victorstringer.author/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/victor-stringer-%E2%80%94-published-poet-author/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/201964327-victor-stringer

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