A Two Minute Forty Second Night

Steven Ray Smith’s 45 short poems form a book-length prayer around a common human question: what does it mean, and feel like, to live in a world of uncertainty while remaining hopeful of a redemptive future? The poems flow from an initial awareness of our temporality, to our desire to fight back against a lack of control, to an initial acceptance of life through action, to a final meditative state of being and moving forward in a precarious world.