A moving nonfiction debut by Mississippi Delta poet Mike Smith, this memoir-in-essays, AND THERE WAS EVENING AND THERE WAS MORNING: ESSAYS ON ILLNESS, LOSS, AND LOVE, tracks the loss of Smith's first wife to cancer after the birth of the second child, offering a portrait of marriage, family, and tragedy. In honest, and at times darkly comic terms, Smith documents the strange set of coincidences between his first wife's illness and his stepdaughter's similar battle the year his second marriage began, and examines blended families, remarriage, helping children find ways to cope with the loss of a parent, and the influence of spirituality upon loss.