Optimist

Joshua Mehigan was born in upstate New York in 1969. Since 1993 he has lived in New York City and worked as an editor and English teacher. Published in many journals, including the Chattahoochee Review, Dogwood, The Formalist, Pequod, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and Verse, his poems and translations are also forthcoming in anthologies from Word Press and Zoo Press. His poems have won the Dogwood Poetry Contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

"Terse, tightly wound, as swift and barbed as arrows, this collection of fifty poems hits cleanly and hard." (ForeWord Reviews) "This book is a remarkable achievement." "Something of the energy, the savagery and emotional fierceness of Robert Lowell’s early poems are to be found in this impressive book by Joshua Mehigan. These poems are often wound tight as spring, and are concentrations of violent feelings and visions of cruelty, yet uttered in a language quietly brilliant, as well as undeniably powerful." "The Optimist, by Joshua Mehigan, is remarkable for its mastery of form and of tone. Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in the way he plays speech rhythms against the patters of verse, creating a tense, deceptively simple music…." (New York Sun) "One of the major pleasures of reading this book is becoming absorbed in Mehigan's mastery of formal craft…. In the best possible way, he shows us exactly what we need to see or know, and nothing more. In my opinion, this is a sign of an incredibly promising writer, one who knows that 'wisdom lies…in what remains unsaid.'" (Mid-American Review) "Mehigan's first full-length poetry collection, The Optimist, not only repays re-reading, but requires it." (Valparaiso Poetry Review) "Wise, evocative and deftly executed, Mehigan's poems are old souls…. Readers will find themselves reveling in the magic of The Optimist—and returning to its fine poems again and again." (The Columbus Dispatch) "This is a poet with absolutely no reliance on madness or on romantic mismatch between himself and the world, and he should, at the very least, be able to keep doing what he's doing as impressively as he has been doing it, which is awfully impressively." (Poetry) "Mehigan is already the sort of poet who gives you lines you want to write down and remember…. There's nothing old-fashioned about rhyme and meter when they're used with mastery. Reader, Joshua Mehigan's poetry is a passionate pursuit of the real." (The Hudson Review) "There is more insight into domestic grief in these and other poems in The Optimist than in a dozen louder, more overtly confessional books. And that sense of insight born from experience is what makes Mehigan's work so moving and impressive. Few American poets, old or young, seem to know so much." (Contemporary Poetry Review) "Joshua Mehigan is one of the best poets of his and my generation—his book The Optimist is wonderfully intelligent and dark, and his work since then is even better." "Joshua Mehigan's The Optimist, though a first book, is already the work of a master coming into his unique own. Mehigan writes with a deep and alarming calmness that derives directly from his mastery, and his poems shine with luminous strangeness. The Optimist possesses the mysterious vision and power of great art."