A Day in the Republic

In his latest book A DAY IN THE REPUBLIC Tim Suermondt continues to show himself to be one of our most interesting poets. Suermondt doesn't have just one subject or one angle or one idea: like Whitman he contains multitudes and is not shy about showing it.

The poet and novelist Charlie Smith has written that "a writer is like a worker with a toolbox." And few poets use what's in their literary toolbox better than Tim Suermondt in his new collection of poems A Day in the Republic. The singular and the cosmopolitan side-by-side as they explore and live in the neighborhood and the world: The night rides its moonlight cover/and the city and its inhabitants/are rolled up in its folds. Not to worry,/there's plenty of life still inside/starting with marigolds, hammers-shoes/and books that will take you anywhere. These poems teem with heart and brio, open to the celebratory in this often difficult and tragic world. A Day in the Republic helps explain as best it can in striking poems what it takes to make the world bearable and why anything is possible: Not everything is right, it never/is, but there's no stopping me now,/the world in a cap tagging along.

Tim Suermondt has been called "an erudite and entertaining poet" a creator of some of the finest love poems. His new collection is brimming with human relationships, his beloved cities, history and literature, the everyday magical and disappointing occurrences, and his jump shot, still sublime in memory. A DAY IN THE REPUBLIC might make us also ready to repair anything the world keeps breaking.