The Cost of Everything: Thirty Poems for a World Running on Empty

By Paul stiling

Everything costs more than it used to. The shopping. The heating. The act of keeping going.

In thirty unflinching poems, Paul Stiling maps the emotional landscape of modern life - the food bank queue coiling past the shuttered pub, the meter ticking after the television goes off, the three-in-the-morning accounting that no spreadsheet was designed to capture.

These are poems about the world we are actually living in. About war and its quiet aftermath. About energy bills and empty wallets and the particular exhaustion of caring enough to keep watching when everything is designed to make you look away. About the men who came home different and the women who make the soup stretch and the volunteers already in the hall before the town is properly awake.

Raw, grounded, and quietly defiant, The Cost of Everything moves from frustration through struggle toward something like hope - not the triumphant kind, but the flickering kind. The light that has been meaning to go out for longer than expected and hasn't.

'The dark has a long history of becoming morning.'

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GTGWQ888
• ISBN13: 9798253078709
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.0" x 8.0"