Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "The world has long been full of praise for Jim Sallis's crime novels' poetic prose and richly-described landscapes. It is time that we simply call Sallis a poet, one who depicts and reveals our inner landscape. These poems [in BLACK NIGHT'S GONNA CATCH ME HERE] are both musical and plainspoken; they do not employ 'exalted speech' (as he says, 'we fought it. Took barrooms / home to bed, the American idiom, real warts / on imaginary frogs') but instead use language for the best reasons, to 'find beauty, try to understand, survive.'"—Katrina Vandenberg