If a poet ends a poem early in a book with, ‘And always a hellhound be,’ I keep reading. If, several poems later, a speaker is burning his deceased father's toupee in the yard, I keep reading—harder, closer. Christopher Salerno's Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!

—Tom Lux

In his haunting fourth collection, Salerno weaves a morbid kind of melancholia into the mundane and negotiates the experience of loss and a lack of fulfillment…The poems disquietingly hum with questions of what to do after death—whether one’s own or another’s. For whatever simple answers the poet seems to have for great unspoken questions—‘There are ways to say die/ without a findable body’—Salerno wields just as many queries, yielding a book ripe with eerie and meaning-filled unknowing.

—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)