“Jim Reese … He’s our Mark Twain of this century … Jim writes about the everyday experience, and he, in my view, is therefore America’s poet.”
—Grace Cavalieri, from the Poet and the Poem at the Library of Congress
“We call it the heartland but we seldom drop by for a visit. Jim Reese catches the dying fire of the small town wasteland that staggers on with meth, desire, and neglect. These loving poems open the door to the real little house on the prairie. Time to step inside and finally have one honest moment with the forgotten center of our people.”
— Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields
Coming to a Neighborhood near You
A deeply personal and unflinching exploration of crime, trauma, and the American justice system
In his long search to process his grief over the rape and murder of his teenage friend by a fellow classmate, Jim Reese becomes entangled in prisons—both physically and psychologically. Coming to a Neighborhood near You is the result: his investigative memoir of crime and punishment in the twenty-first-century United States.
For fourteen years Reese worked with men and women in prisons to develop, edit, and produce stories from “system-impacted” students, including some who had committed murder. He went on more than 250 hours of ride-alongs with law enforcement officers to see crime from the front end. He sought to understand addiction, trauma, and why people commit unlawful acts, some hauntingly heinous, with results rippling far beyond the primary victims to families, friends, and communities.
In a forthright reckoning with his own fear, desire for protection, and lingering anxiety, Reese wrestles with what humankind is capable of and what mercy means in the work of moving forward. Coming to a Neighborhood near You presents true accounts of mass incarceration and an interrogation of how to confront the human rights crisis in America’s criminal justice system.
Other Books by Jim Reese
Dancing Room Only
Dancing Room Only is a wild romp into the forgotten center of our people. With his signature rollicking style, a keen sense of humor, and… Read More
Bone Chalk
BONE CHALK by Jim Reese (Stephen F. Austin State U. Press, November 2019) Ride shotgun down the back-roads of the Great Plains as Reese becomes… Read More
Really Happy
Everything about Really Happy, Jim Reese’s third full-length collection of poetry, is ordinary – focused on life all around us. But out of this ordinary… Read More
