In Joshua Mehigan's award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the poems in The Optimist unapologetically employ traditional poetic technique, and, in each of these, Mehigan stretches the fabric of living language over a framework of regular meter to produce a compelling sonic counterpoint.
The Optimist stares at contemporary darkness visible, a darkly lit tableau that erases the boundary between the world and the perceiving self. Whether narrative or lyric, dramatic or satirical,...
In Joshua Mehigan's award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the...
Winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, The Optimist is the first book by a young poet whose work has been widely published in literary journals. As final judge James Cummins said, Mehigan accesses a tradition of voices - the echoes in The Optimist are, to name a few, of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell.
Winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, The Optimist is the first book by a young poet whose work has been widely published in literary journals. A...
One of "The New York Times"' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poets
A shark's tooth, the shape-shifting cloud drifting from a smokestack, the smoke detectors that hang, ominous but disregarded, overhead very little escapes the watchful eye of Joshua Mehigan. The poems in "Accepting the Disaster" range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication....
One of "The New York Times"' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poets
