Shaking Up the Insides of the Word

"Williams, who once declared, 'The local is the only universal,' wrote for the most part out of Rutherford, his pediatric experiences and urban life. (Whitman earlier had pared his subject to the wider American, but frequently limited it to New York City and environs.) Rudy Thomas, who, by the way, quite admires the poetry and poetics of the New Jersey dynamo, writes about his native Clinton County, Kentucky, to the point that, like the poetry of Jim Wayne Miller or the fiction of James Still, two other Appalachian writers, Thomas' work carries a cultural significance as well as a literary one. . . " - Harry Brown (from the Foreword)