“The Waiting brings to mind the mosaic precision and the complex music of Marianne Moore: ‘I have rearranged your eyes into glass pinecones.’ Here is a sensibility so complex and rich as to compose poems of rarefied beauty and haunting eloquence. Megan Johnson fashions 'an urn chipped by loving,' a work of intelligence and elegance and sensual pleasure.”—D. A. Powell, author of Cocktails

“The Waiting is a great first book, obsessed, driven, full of the passion that is the discovery of poetry, the passionate invention of a language for speaking the unspeakable, the invention of an unspeakable self discovered by poetry. Megan Johnson’s gift is enormous. Her work is a reminder that a poetry dedicated to speaking the truth never loses its power to shock a reader into awareness.”—Mark Levine

“With her very first words in The Waiting—‘See here’—Megan Johnson pledges herself to a daring, darling imperative: an open eye, an immediate presence. And she keeps her pledge, forwarding a sparkling and insouciant vision always farther in the direction of the day. It is a brilliant day.”—Donald Revell, author of Arcady and My Mojave