To play “cutting the devil’s throat,” hold a round stone as if you were going to skip it across the water, but throw it straight up into the air. If you do it right, the stone drops into the water without a splash, making only a sound like a gulp. The poems in Cutting the Devil’s Throat create the persona of a young man cutting through darkness to light, finding a way to live a sane, useful life through modest yet deliberate daily action. In ghazal suites, short lyrics, and longer narrative poems, Steeves uses clean, precise language to open loopholes of vision in what is, for a young husband and father, a confusing, even threatening world.