Cultivating Disaster

Michael Lista praises Joshua Mehigan's new book, Accepting the Disaster, for the way it "tames the chaos with technique":

Mehigan represents a vital alternative to the canard that the only way to faithfully represent the messiness of contemporary life is with messy writing, the pseudo-profundity of the self-indulgently obtuse, a pathologically American idée fixe that’s dominated the last hundred years of poetic thinking and can be traced from T.S. Eliot through Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery and so many MFA theses. “Because forethought and discretion rarely appear in my personal life,” Mehigan writes, “I like to cultivate them in my poems.” It’s precisely because Mehigan is so well acquainted with disaster and disorder that he records them so painstakingly and precisely, according them the memorability they deserve.