Winner of the New American Poetry Prize (New American Press, 2012), selected by T.R. Hummer.

“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…”
                                                                                                 ~~T.R. Hummer
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“On his own eloquently ruminative, often speedily allusive 'errand into the wilderness’--whether that 'wilderness' be China or America--Stephen Haven discovers the rich textures of landscape, the bewildering array of cultural facts and forces, the colorful detritus of ever-simmering political contradictions, and how all these can inflict and pressure a single alert consciousness, or tinge with elegy the tight nexus of a single family. In their moral questioning and aesthetic awareness, as well as in their practical attentiveness to the variously eccentric world as it is, the precisely pitched poems and translations of The Last Sacred Place in North America provide a vade mecum of enriching meditations for any wakeful voyager.”
                                                                                              ~~Eamon Grennan

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