The World Doesn't Know You

"A joyful love of life shines through brilliantly in Tim Suermondt's The World Doesn't Know You. Whether the speaker of the poem is spreading tar on a roof with his father, envisioning Sinatra spurned by a lover, or wearing a Mets cap in a cathedral, the tone is consistently appealing: charmed and charming. The love poems to his wife are written with enormous feeling and no sentimentality. Not a word is out of place in this book and Suermondt's voice is equal to the vast range of people and places encountered throughout the collection."--John Skoyles, Author of Suddenly It's Evening: Selected Poems

"You will marvel at the poems in Tim Suermondt's new collection the way you would marvel at a spring bubbling up from God-knows-where with a water so sweet and clear that you can't help but cup your hands and drink deeply. Poem after poem in The World Doesn't Know You brims with exuberant, colloquial, big-hearted insight. Soon you realize that these are Suermondt's psalms, his praise-songs and love-songs for the lives we manage to eke out of a world that intermingles hopes and fears, glories and misery, and gives us every once in a while a glimpse of a band of sparrows flying overhead "in ordained ragged formation / ever so beautifully."--Fred Marchant, Author of Said Not Said