In his lyrical and expansive debut, Jonathan Graham highlights the natural world, the rugged beauty and kinship with a coal-mining region in Appalachia, the loud thunder when relatives and townspeople die in a devastating mine explosion - the yin and yang of love and death, remorse and longing. These poems are hungry, filled with vivid imagery. A quest for beauty in a world of chaos, Everything Waits travels an arc, moves from Appalachia to search the greater natural world beyond: the mountains of Alaska, islands of Lake Erie, beaches of the Carolinas and Gulf Coast, then circles back to the foothills of Ohio's Appalachia. As the poetry moves from darkness to light and back again into darkness with the promise of light, there exists the divining comfort of "words everywhere," where it is okay to move away from living.
