Supermarket Arithmetic: Poems of Austerity, Recovery, and Staying (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798250362979)

A receipt unspooling past your knuckles. A radiator turned off at nine. A card machine that pauses just long enough to expose the pulse in your throat. These are the textures of Supermarket Arithmetic - a debut collection of forty poems that finds the full weight of a life in the smallest, most overlooked moments of getting by.

Paul Stiling writes about austerity not as politics but as weather - the kind you live inside, that gets into the walls and the sleep and the way you speak to each other in the kitchen at dawn. These are poems of the reduced shelf and the direct debit that leaves at 02:17, of the phone glowing blue in the dark and the cupboard where the empty bottles are kept. Not to drink. To remember.

In three movements - Static, Flicker, and Light Left On - the collection traces a quiet arc. The first section maps the terrain of financial precarity with unflinching precision: the arithmetic of warmth, the ritual of the kettle, the way two people learn to take up less space than they need. The second moves into harder country - near-relapse, the therapist's office, arguments in February, grief for friends taken too soon. The third turns, carefully and without false comfort, toward repair: a fixed washer, a Sunday dinner, a light left burning in the hallway.

This is a collection about recovery in the broadest sense - from addiction, from poverty's slow erosion, from the losses that don't make headlines. It is also, quietly, a love story. The love here is not grand or declarative. It is the better half of the toast, handed over without comment. A foot finding yours under the table without looking. The smallest revolutions.

Stiling's poems are spare, precise, and deeply humane. They do not reach for consolation. They reach for the truth - and find, in that truth, an unexpected tenderness that stays with the reader long after the page is turned.

For readers of Sharon Olds, Simon Armitage, and Maggie Nelson. For anyone who has counted coins at a checkout, sat with a phone at 3am, or left the hallway light on for someone coming home late.

"Recovery is sometimes / a museum you curate alone."