Familiar to listeners of National Public Radio, David Budbill is beloved by legions for straightforward poems dispatched from his hermitage on Judevine Mountain. Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, he follows tradition but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern solitary existence. Loneliness, aging and political outrage are addressed in poems that value honesty and simplicity and deplore pretension.

For more than three decades, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont writing poems, reading Chinese classics, tending to his garden and, of course, working on his website. Budbill has been featured more than any other author on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

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The stage is Judevine, an imaginary town in northern Vermont. This is a small stage, sometimes cold and darkened, but filled with characters so finely etched that they stand out as clearly as steeples against the sky. David Budbill plunges into the soul of New England to find characters and stories with lessons for anyone wanting to find the intrinsic nature of the region that has been called "all of America's backyard." These dark, lyrical, funny narrative poems portray the hopes and joys, pains and despair of people who have been bypassed or bruised by the twentieth century. Budbill has written a song of the down-and-out or overlooked, a song of the unsung. This anthem of the rural renaissance is microcosmic in setting, but universal in scope....