Stephen Haven's The Flight from Meaning (Slant Books, 2025) was a finalist for England's International Beverly Prize for Literature. Winner of grants and/or residencies from the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Djerassi Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, he has published three earlier poetry collections, The Last Sacred Place in North America, Dust and Bread, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks.

Other poems on the web by Stephen Haven:
Three poems
Two poems
Three poems
"Willow"

Stephen Haven's Website.

About The Flight from Meaning:

"Stephen Haven's The Flight from Meaning strains at the limits of expression, trying to see past, around, and through layers of intellectually imposed 'meaning' to the thing that drove him first to meaning: the poet's own past, family, and the natural world. The Flight from Meaning is also a flight toward the beauties of language, which the poet employs with angular and dazzling lyricism: 'the enormity of that calling, / God and his absence, against any utterance, / Not of the blood, the body only, / Melting on the tongue-tip the untold story.'"
—Andrew Hudgins

"Stephen Haven's The Flight from Meaning is masterful in its rubric of language poetry and its urgent and operatic call to the Anthropocene for new symbiotic memes. Each poem disrupts and interrogates the mundane, mirrors our 'human place jungled in the dark,' and in acts of flux removes scaffolding and counters the hubris of our times. Haven's poems call up that 'beast in its rebellion,' Haraway's cyborg of dystopia, summoning new 'seeing from the dark.'"
—Rosa Lane