Loose Change & Echoes is a raw, honest collection of 20 poems that speak to the struggles most of us never say out loud. From scraping together rent money to lying awake in an empty bed, these poems give voice to the quarter-life crisis, the heartbreak that lingers like a ghost, and the quiet dignity of working hard for too little. By turns tender and defiant, each piece captures a universal feeling - the ache of love, the weight of loss, and the daily grind of making ends meet. Whether you're counting pennies or counting memories, this collection will meet you exactly where you are.
These are poems for the people who check their bank balance at midnight and feel their stomach drop. For the ones who still sleep on one side of the bed out of habit, even months after someone stopped coming home. For those who smile through double shifts and say they're fine, because explaining the truth would take longer than they have. For anyone who has ever stood in the gap between the life they planned and the life they're actually living, wondering how the distance got so wide.
Paul Stiling writes from the outside looking in - from street corners and diner booths, from the particular silence of empty rooms and the noise of cities that never slow down long enough to let you catch your breath. His eye catches what others walk past: the way someone counts their change twice, the coffee mug left behind on a kitchen counter, the polaroid photo that's too painful to keep and too precious to throw away. In Loose Change & Echoes, those small observed moments become something larger - a portrait of a generation trying to hold love and loss and financial survival all at once, with two hands that were never quite big enough for all of it.
The collection moves through four emotional territories. There is love here - electric and overwhelming, the kind that makes ordinary Tuesday mornings feel like miracles. There is loss - not just of people, but of versions of yourself you thought you'd be by now. There is the weight of money, or the lack of it; the specific exhaustion of working hard and still coming up short, of watching the dream recede while the bills stay constant. And threading through all of it, there is resilience - stubborn, unshowy, deeply human - the kind that doesn't announce itself but simply keeps going anyway.
These poems do not offer easy comfort. They don't promise that everything works out or that the pain has a neat lesson wrapped inside it. What they offer instead is recognition. The feeling of reading a line and thinking: yes, that. Exactly that. I thought I was the only one. That moment of recognition - of feeling less alone inside your own experience - is what poetry does better than anything else, and it is what this collection was built to deliver.
Whether you come to these pages carrying heartbreak or hope, exhaustion or defiance, Loose Change & Echoes will sit with you wherever you are. It won't look away from the hard parts. It won't dress them up or soften their edges. It will simply hold them up to the light and say: this is real, this matters, and you are not alone in feeling it.
Some things are worth more than what they cost. This collection believes that deeply - about love, about art, and about the people who keep going even when the loose change runs out.
