“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.”
John Hollander
“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.”
Anthony Hecht
“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….”
Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
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, Mehigan’s poems explore death, desire, and change with a mixture of reason and compassion.
In choosing The Optimist for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, final judge James Cummins, wrote:
“The world is given its due in these poems, but its due is the subjective voice making ‘objective’ reality into the reality of art. To do this 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—to form with great integrity his own. It isn’t that Mehigan is concerned more with what’s outside himself than inside; nor merely that he travels the highway between the two with such humility and grace. It’s also that these voices, this great tradition, infuses his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder.”
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.
More info →
Retail price:
$17.95 ·
Save 20% ($14.36)
Retail price:
$29.95 ·
Save 20% ($23.96)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Paperback
978-0-8214-1612-9
Retail price: $17.95,
S.
Release date: May 2005
61 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1611-2
Retail price: $29.95,
S.
Release date: May 2005
61 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4132-9
Release date: May 2005
61 pages
Rights: World
“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.”
Adam Kirsch
“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.”
Andrew Hudgins
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets
Edited by David Yezzi
·
Foreword by J. D. McClatchy
Groundbreaking anthologies of this kind come along once in a generation and, in time, define that generation. The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets identifies a group of poets who have recently begun to make an important mark on contemporary poetry, and their accomplishment and influence will only grow with time. The poets gathered here do not constitute a school or movement; rather they are a group of unique artists working at the top of their craft.
Terminal Diagrams
Poems
By Garrick Davis
Garrick Davis’s Terminal Diagrams may have been inspired by the illustrated maps in airport lounges, or perhaps they are the blueprints of the Apocalypse, with their subjects and objects representing the bitter fruits of either some future nightmare or the present world. Regardless, their vision is so bleak and unsparing, only a few will be able to savor them. Here, the art of poetry has been mechanized just as the world has been mechanized.
Solving for X
Poems
By Robert B. Shaw
In Solving for X, his award-winning collection of new poems, Robert B. Shaw probes the familiar and encounters the unexpected; in the apparently random he discerns a hidden order. Throughout, Shaw ponders the human frailties and strengths that continue to characterize us, with glances at the stresses of these millennial times that now test our mettle and jar our complacency. Often touched with humor, his perceptions are grounded in devoted observation of the changing world.As
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
An Explanation of Meter and Versification
By Timothy Steele
Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms.
Literary Criticism, Poetry · Creative Writing · Literature · Poetry
