Dark Waves and Light Matter is an energetic, eclectic gathering of Goldbarth's recent essays. They are part meditations and part short stories, part scholarship and part downright sassiness. A paean to 1950s comic book villains leads, through a visit with Charles Dickens, to a contemplation on the unity of the first day of Creation. Agatha Christie, Timothy Leary, and Pieter Brueghel all contribute equally to a consideration of how the unity of our lives is perforated by tiny moments of disjunction. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wizard of Oz, and the National Enquirer unlock a study of patricide and UFOlogy.

These essays look squarely at large, tough, all-encompassing ideas, but they don't ignore the small specifics that multiply into a day, for example, one "lone orchid pressed into an album; its oils have long past stained the paper around it translucent, a wimple of spectral sheen".

Annie Dillard has said that Goldbarth's prose is "lively, brilliant, vivid, witty, and informed" and Dark Waves and Light Matter triumphantly confirms this assessment.