A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America.

A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and hollers. To Kathleen Stewart, this particular exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernisation, materialism, and democray. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women just settin track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated story-telling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of just talk, Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal on the side of the road. It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by progress. Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let