James Cummins [on choosing The Optimist for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize]:

“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 Joshua 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, infuse his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder.”