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    The Optimist: Poems
    The Optimist: Poems
    The Optimist: Poems
    Ebook69 pages28 minutes

    The Optimist: Poems

    By Joshua Mehigan

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    About this ebook

    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.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateMay 10, 2005
    ISBN9780821441329
    The Optimist: Poems
    Author

    Joshua Mehigan

    Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in periodicals including The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, where he has been a frequent contributor of poems and essays. His writing has also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in numerous anthologies. He is the recent recipient of Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize for Feature Article, and of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mehigan lives in New York City.

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      Book preview

      The Optimist - Joshua Mehigan

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