Christmas Eve, and other Poems

This slender collection defies the expectations of holiday verse. The title poem, 'Christmas Eve,' casts aside jolly expectations to dwell in shadow and silence, offering instead a meditation on solitude, longing, and the strange quiet that descends on winter nights. Stebbins writes with a restraint that feels almost reverent, finding beauty not in celebration but in the spaces between joy and grief. The poems that follow are remarkably diverse in form and feeling, yet they share a sensibility attuned to subtlety and moment. Together, they compose something quietly disarming: a book to read alone on a cold evening, when the world outside feels both distant and intimately present. For readers who have ever felt that Christmas Eve holds more shadow than light, this collection offers the strange comfort of recognition.