An underground New York poet offers off-beat, irreverently sweet takes on thecurrent American scene, both funny and touching.

In his new collection, JUST BEAUTIFUL, Tim Suermondt writes poems about the present, the past and the future, poems dealing with the glories and follies, the tragedies and triumphs of the human heart and of the world. His poems never ask to be more than poems, but they will change your perceptions in ways you couldn't imagine.

"In this, Tim Suermondt's third full-length book of poems, he uses the word beautiful sixteen times, each time the word as fresh and apt a choice as it is the first time. But that's not surprising if you know Suermondt's work. He is a poet who seems especially well-fitted out to find moments of beauty in this world without sacrificing his wry understanding of the world's absurdities and complications. One might say, in fact, that Suermondt's alter ego is a Romanticist of both tender and heroic proportions, who not only transforms the mundane into the mythic, but more cleverly, the mythic into...