On the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, Merge is reissuing the epic it inspired: Richard Buckner's The Hill.

The Hill started in 1996 in an old garage that had been converted to The Ranch Olancha Motel, a dusty place near the mouth of Death Valley, between Lone Pine and Dunmovin, California.

Buckner, who was en route to Tucson, Arizona, to record what would become Devotion & Doubt, stayed a week in a room with no phone, no television, carrying his guitar, a four-track recorder, and a copy of Masters' Spoon River Anthology.

He tinkered with a few of the book's poems, put them on a cassette, and forgot about it until an acquaintance discovered it in his truck four years later.

Beset with writer's block and looking for a distraction, Buckner would find in the tape the spur he needed.

Buckner chooses 18 of these confessions, each given a unique rendering. Backed by Calexico's Joey Burns and John Convertino and surveyed with Buckner's unflagging vocal desperation, Spoon River's residents come back to life.

Like so much of his career, Buckner disappeared into Spoon River and returns to us with its story.