Caffeine is an intimate and evocative collection of poetry encompassed by the thoughts that keep us awake at night. Award-winning author Steven Bruce returns to deliver haunting poems that explore the universal themes of love, time, grief, and mortality. Winner of the 2023 Firebird Book Award Winner of the 2023 Book Authority Best Books Award Semi-finalist for the 2022 Indies Today Book Awards #1 Amazon Hot New Releases in British Poetry #1 Amazon Hot New Releases in Contemporary Poetry #1 Amazon Hot New Releases in Poetry About Death Praise for Caffeine: "Bruce writes with a brutal honesty few poets nowadays dare to confront. He is writing for every one of us who has been hung out to dry by the cruelties and complexities of our individual lives. And he does this using simple language that says far more than its simplicity suggests. There is a wealth of learnt wisdom in his lines of "lightning". Caffeine is a rare thing - it is a tombstone, a declaration, a reflection of an old soul, yet it is tender, and Bruce's poems make it clear that the only form of redemption we will ever find will be through love. It is quite simply beautiful - what poetry, in the hands of a non-bullshitter, is capable of."─ Martin Hayes, Poet and Author "Bruce has a rare talent to convey that raw emotion with such an electricity that you'll have to pause to calm your trembling heart."─ Steve Quade, Indies Today "Poems that drift like pungent steam from a late night cup of coffee in an Edward Hopper painting. Here the economy of Raymond Carver converses over a counter with Lorca's Duende, the verbal flair of Barry MacSweeny debates in a booth with Robert Burns' Romanticism, and through their echoes comes the lived experience of a troubled past that turns the present into a fragile and precious gift. W.B. Yeats said, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but the quarrel with ourselves, poetry", Steven Bruce's new collection shines a creative light upon those inner voices that bicker during the Witching Hours."─ Dr Bob Beagrie, Poet and Lecturer