The Weight Of Smoke: Poems of Grief and Memory (Fire & Light Book 5)

The Weight of Smoke
Poems of Grief and Memory

What do we become after the fire, when the flames are gone but the smoke still lingers in our lungs?

In The Weight of Smoke, Book 5 of the Poetry of the Fire & Light Series, D. Vincent DeLorenzo writes from a masculine but deeply vulnerable place, tracing the quiet aftershocks of grief and the long work of learning how to live again.

These poems move through four sections:

• the ash we kept – memory, regret, the fragments we couldn’t let go

• the rooms we never entered – missed chances, unspoken words, versions of ourselves we avoided

• the fire we survived – trauma, endurance, nights we never thought we would make it through

• the smoke that made us – gentleness, healing, choosing to stay, and rebuilding a softer life

With clean, modern lines and an honest voice, DeLorenzo writes for readers who are carrying their own losses in silence. These are poems for:

• the one who can’t walk into a certain room without feeling their chest tighten

• the one who laughs again for the first time and doesn’t quite trust the sound

• the one who pours a second cup of coffee for someone who is no longer here

• the one quietly deciding to stay alive for small, ordinary reasons

There are no clichés here, no neat answers. Instead, you’ll find small brave mornings, grocery store mercy, late-night mirrors, and the kind of love that checks the locks twice because it remembers what you survived.

Whether you’ve followed this journey from She Was the Fire, Her Wild Embers, The Spark She Saved, and When We Were Light, or you’re meeting this series for the first time, The Weight of Smoke can be read as a complete, stand-alone collection.

Perfect for fans of Rupi Kaur, Atticus, Lang Leav, Yrsa Daley-Ward, and Nayyirah Waheed, this book belongs on the bedside tables of anyone learning to carry grief without letting it harden their heart.

This is a book for late nights, early mornings, and the in-between hours when you need a few quiet lines to remind you:

you are still here,
you are not alone,
and the smoke that made you
has not taken your light.