James Sallis' latest poetry collection is a study in gothic noir where post- war trauma surfaces in a speaker's haunted relationship with time and space, where the familiar is strange, and the strange is familiar. In Night's Pardons, Sallis writes of the "terror of the ordinary," the things that keep us up at night, that populate the darkness waiting for an absolution we cannot muster, from which we can find no peace except in the language of poetry itself.