A poetry collection written as a travelogue through loss and grief, defeat and gift, designed to help others find their way too.
Everything Is charts a path from shock to reality, from haunting to lesson. When Eichelberger's father passed away, it was his first brush with real grief. It marked the loss of his model, mentor, friend, and sounding board. He had no roadmap, no language to consult, just a limbic system on fire. Exploring this state required poetry. The result is Everything Is. Written in a compression of modern and classic forms, Everything Is pulls indirectly from biology, anthropology, psychology, and experience on the topic of grief and death. At times it's lyrical, at times jagged and grim, but it never looks away. It summons everyone not to turn away or numb, but to hurt, learn, and feel.
"Miguel Eichelberger's Everything Is is a book of love poems about the loss of his father. For those of us who have experienced such loss, Eichelberger evokes the deeply familiar disembodiment, the slow unwinding of the first minutes and hours. He takes us back to the place where we first begin that long wait for forgetting, the fading of details, the healing of grief. I had not thought I would ever want to go back, but the intimate, graceful shock of these poems allows it. Imagine my gratitude to discover that I have not forgotten. Not at all." -Mark Green, author of Remaking Manhood: Stories From the Front Lines of Change
"It's common wisdom that there are no adequate words to describe the depth and complexity of grief. Yet in this stunning work, Miguel Eichelberger manages to excavate his own experience of grief and transform it into exquisite language that makes anyone who has ever grieved-in short, everyone-feel seen and known. With an unflinching yet compassionate eye on his own interiority and the way it connects him to his fellow humans, he guides us through the landscape of pain and the gifts that are buried within it. This is a collection that will remind you that you are not alone, even when you are missing someone with all your heart, and that will make you feel grateful to be alive, even when that life is difficult." -Stephanie Harrison, New York Times best-selling author of The New Happy
"In Miguel Eichelberger's Everything Is, we are given poems both clear-eyed and unafraid to wear their heart on their sleeve. With honesty and surprise, Eichelberger takes us through grief's most tender and most clinical moments, the poems working together like light on faceted glass, culminating in a collection that shines." -Donna Kane, author of Orrery, a finalist for the Governor General's Award
