Walking Through Shadows: Poems of Darkness, Hope, and the In-Between

What do we do with the shadows that refuse to leave?In this debut collection of fifty-eight poems, Steven J. Harrold turns toward the places many people spend a lifetime avoiding: childhood fear, broken relationships, addiction, grief, cancer, aging, and the knowledge that every life must end. Walking Through Shadows, foremost, is not a book of despair. It is a book about what happens when we face darkness without surrendering our capacity for love, humor, wonder, and hope.Organized in five parts-from Entering the Shadows to What Remains-the collection moves through intimate confession, narrative poetry, social satire, and lyrical reflection. Its settings range from a neighborhood bar and a corporate boardroom to Tijuana, Hyderabad, Hoi An, a chemotherapy ward, a nursing home, and Pashupatinath Temple.Across these varied landscapes, Harrold returns to essential questions: What do we owe the people we love? How do we live with what cannot be repaired? What remains when certainty, health, and identity fall away?The poems are direct and accessible, yet rich in image and metaphor. A chemotherapy machine becomes a cold, clicking tree. A dear friend's final struggle becomes one last hill to climb. A dying leaf returns itself to the roots that sustained it. Humor lives beside sorrow, tenderness beside anger, and hope not as a last-ditch effort, but as an act of resistance.For readers drawn to contemporary poetry about trauma, healing, masculinity, mortality, resilience, and renewal, Walking Through Shadows offers a revelatory companion that does not ask us to look away, but to continue walking.