Joshua Mehigan lives in New York City and has 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.

About The Optimist:

"Something of the energy, the savagery and emotional fierceness of Robert Lowell’s early poems is to be found in this impressive book by Joshua Mehigan. These poems are often wound tight as springs, and are concentrations of violent feelings and visions of cruelty, yet uttered in a language quietly brilliant, as well as undeniably powerful."
—Anthony Hecht

"Joshua Mehigan, for me, has been a discovery. He is possessed of a fine sensibility, a sense of humor, and a rare gift for converting deeply felt experience into works of art. . . . It is a pleasure to recommend this delightful, very promising first book of poems."
— Anne Stevenson

"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

"Joshua Mehigan is a poet of glowing gifts—his exquisite control of meter and rhyme and his never-failing diction, pointed and resonant both, are startlingly good, as is his sense of pace and timing in poem after poem. But his talents are not merely displayed in these profoundly affecting poems, but rather gloriously employed in their conception and framing. From the freshness and grace of the opening ‘Promenade,’ through the darker sonnets—including the fine title poem—this book is a remarkable achievement."
—John Hollander

"W.B. Yeats, in an exhortation, wrote: ‘Irish poets, learn your trade!’ Joshua Mehigan has learned his trade. These beautifully made and deeply moving poems add up to The Optimist, a brilliant and brave first book."
—Thomas Lux