From Jeannie Kidera on The Optimist, in Mid-American Review:

        “[Mehigan] captures the reader right away with such opening lines as ‘The fire transformed the bedspread into fire,’ from ‘The Spectacle,’ and holds onto them with such metaphors as ‘between a half-dreamt porch and headlight glare, / love lowered its muzzled head, growled in defeat, / and dragged its chain across the bottom stair’ from ‘ “If Ye Find My Beloved . . .” ’ Yet, 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.’
       “It is clear that Mehigan utilizes this unspoken wisdom to effectively heighten the power of what he does, quite carefully, choose to put on the page. He demonstrates an intense poetic craftsmanship, as well as a steady courage, or obsessive need, to explore the dark even without a sure promise of hope. This, itself, is enlightening. Mehigan’s poetry doesn’t seem to set out to find and then vehemently endorse a bright hope, nor does it seem to set out to finally and completely disqualify optimism. Rather, the reader gets the sense that there is a strange hope (perhaps the only real hope) in being able to embrace and find beauty in the honesty of the dark. In ‘Déjà Vu,’ Mehigan writes, ‘The children cried, or sang,’ but this powerful first book, The Optimist, shows us that often the two are one and the same.”