A Doughnut and the Great Beauty of the World by Tim Suermondt

Praise for A Doughnut and the Great Beauty of the World   Tim Suermondt’s masterful poems reveal this poet’s genius for giving voice to the sublime cloaked in wry humor. While Suermondt winks at his readers, he brings to life profoundly spiritual work that is deceptively plainspoken: filtered through the poet’s decency and wisdom, poems that that are forms of worship honoring “The Great Beauty of the World.” Part of this beauty is the radiance of the daily—the joy that one feels while eating a doughnut. “Why do I know drabness has turned into beauty / and is dressing to pay me a visit,” Suermondt asks. In the book’s title poem, he states, “I remember the ugly of the past and I know the worst / of the future is already gearing up to make its visit.” Yet this poet’s work affirms the seemingly contradictory propositions that we live our mortal lives on an earth “lit up / by a strange light from the heavens,” and that the heart and mind can make sense of a “heightened optimism that may doo