The Flight from Meaning

According to T.R. Hummer, “Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate, humanistic ethos.” His poems reflect “concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity’s best hope.” The poems in Haven’s new collection, The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by—and serve as responses to—contemporary culture’s predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction and the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.

But for Haven, mea...