“The setting for Judevine happens to be the hills of rural northern New England, but it could be any place in America where poverty prevails and where the natural world is still a factor in people’s daily lives. David Budbill has been writing his lyrical, dark, funny, narrative poems about the people of Judevine for the past twenty years. This collection–which includes a number of poems never before published–brings them all together for the first time. But the result is more than a collection of individual poems: Judevine becomes one continuous story with the form and feeling of an epic poem or a poetic novel.”

“In Judevine, [Budbill] has written a new American song–a song of the down-and-out, of the neglected and ignored, a song of the unsung.”