Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 082141612X, Paperback)

Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 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. There are echoes in The Optimist of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell. 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.