T. R. Hummer says that "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. . . . '