Outing A Poet

Michael Astrue, the Commissioner of Social Security, has made no secret of his interest in poetry. I received an anonymous e-mail from a reader who believes that the Commissioner is an award-winning poet who publishes under the pen name of A.M. Juster. There is conclusive evidence that the reader is correct. A.M. Juster is an anagram of M.J. Astrue. There is a recording of an interview with A.M. Juster available online as well as a photo which includes A.M. Juster. The voice and the face are Astrue's.

Michael Astrue has not gone to great lengths to hide Juster's true identity nor does he have any reason to. The awards are real and meaningful. Books of Astrue's poetry have been published not by some vanity press but by the University of Evansville Press and the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The Commentary page on Juster's website, written by "Rhina Espaillat" (another pen name?), includes this description of Juster:

He is fairly sunny about other people and the world, in fact, not because he is blind to flaws, but because reason and maturity keep his expectations modest. He doesn't use satire to settle scores with "Them," but to attack, with self-deprecating humor, the traits, customs and practices that need attacking in all of us. He doesn't use lyric poetry to bewail lost hopes, wallow in envy, or complain of having been cheated by life. His keenest dissatisfactions are reserved for those systems and forms of thought that fail to put the human first and give it due weight, like those bureaucrats in "Moscow Zoo" who condone the murder of millions because it fulfills an ideological need.

Here is a epigram by Juster:

Rationale
Poems are best
when compressed

I detest
the rest.