Finalist for the International Beverly Prize for Literature
Forthcoming from Slant Books Spring 2024

"This is an accomplished collection which is impressively sure of itself. It primarily responds to – and if not pays homage then at least continues a conversation with – the Italian poet, film director and general enfant (homme?) terrible Pier Paolo Pasolini. However, the literary influences and nods run much wider than this; ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Philip Larkin and Henry Adams (and surely many others too subtle for my clumsy readings). The thematic concerns are equally wide-ranging; astrophysics, quantum mechanics, alienation, travel, love, religion and the search for lost time. A number of the poems here are very skillfully controlled, 'Rope Tied To A Song' and 'Old Story' being two of my favourites. None of the poems in the collection are anything other than the work of an accomplished writer, but Haven is perhaps at his best in when he moves away from his many literary influences and becomes more personal and narrative: 'My father thought the/Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once,/300 people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, /Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered/Otherwise in their own living rooms, together /They committed to many things, the dignity /Of every human being, the baby lifted high above /My father’s head, as in some ceremonial sense /Of his long-limbed, six foot three, a little thin /But with good bones, white-cassocked, black-haired /Public self, splash of a maroon stole.' - or when he embraces Pasolini’s spirit of iconoclasm and taboo: 'After her second shot the artist starts to talk about /Cryonics of all things, the initiate of her boyfriend/Who attends such conferences…Freeze me, baby!/He once said to her, the height of their bodily passion.'"                                                                                        ~~Niall Bourke