Peering Into Infinity

Announcing the publication of a new
poetry collection from Steven Lewis

On October 28, 2023, Steve’s beloved grandson Rory was killed by a drunk driver in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was twenty-one.

His loss sent shock waves through an enormous, loving family—his parents, his twin brother Connor, his sisters Charlee and Emma, three grandparents, seventeen aunts and uncles, nineteen cousins—and through countless grieving friends.

Confronted daily with the temptation to retreat from life, poet Steven Lewis instead turned to language as a way of moving through overwhelming grief—not as therapy, not as art, not in search of closure, and not to impose meaning on what remains senseless, but simply to give voice to the unendurable and to speak of it.

The work that eventually followed is an intimate, starkly honest series of meditations on grief and memory—an extended love note no one who has ever loved anyone would choose to write.

“Imagine Steve Lewis as a North Star just above the horizon. These pages hold sorrow, love, and the fierce ache of memory—not to explain the unspeakable, but to walk with it. Each poem feels like a sacred stone placed gently along the path of return.”
—Larry Winters, The Making and Unmaking of a Marine

"(Lewis' poems) ask us to 'live each day not as if it's the first or the last, but the only day there is.' This is a beautiful book of poems I read and read again."
—Mihai Grünfeld, Translator of Inherited Words: A Testimony of Resilience by Zoltán Roth.

'To anyone who has lost a love—which is all of us—a parent, child, friend, lover—these remarkable words are for you.”
—John Pielmeier, author of Agnes of God and Hook’s Tale

Steven Lewis is a former Mentor at SUNY-Empire State College and The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College Writing, as well as a longtime freelance writer and editor. He is currently Senior Editor at WritersRead.org. His recent books include a novel, The Lights Around the Shore, and a poetry collection titled Fire in Paradise, co-authored with his daughter Elizabeth Bayou Grace.