Stephen Haven is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008), for which he was named 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (University of New Mexico/West End Press, 2004). He is also author of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). He is Director of the Ashland University MFA Program in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in Ashland, Ohio, and Director of the Ashland Poetry Press.
"Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate humanistic ethos. Every word in this collection reflects concern: concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity's best hope. Global in vision, this worried book is unflinching, yet hopeful, yielding up a world in which 'Your own caesurae, / Your own circumference, / Is the shell of a missing animal. / You pull it tight around you like a cloak. . . . '"
—T.R. Hummer
"Stephen Haven's The Last Sacred Place in North America celebrates human experience as an ongoing act of translation: between silence and language, inner and outer space, child and adult, life and death, Beijing and Heartland. . . . Haven's poems movingly evoke our shared 'sheared experience' as they delineate the landscape of the human heart: our 'last sacred place.'"
—Angie Estes
New American Press
