From Adam Kirsch, “Among Books: The Lines of the Poets,” in the New York Sun:

       “[T]his fall brings a very noteworthy debut. The Optimist . . . is remarkable for its mastery of form and of tone. Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in the way he plays speech rhythms against the patterns of verse, creating a tense, deceptively simple music. . . . Mr. Mehigan also has something of Frost’s delight in darkness; many of his poems offer the uncomfortable surprise that Poe called the most important element of poetry. In all of his beautifully composed (in both senses) poems, Mr. Mehigan conjures the uncanniness of ‘a distant place/of ordinary lives remembered slant.’ ”