M. Ray Allen's first published collection was The Roads I Travel (Troy, Maine: Nightshade Press 1990), a brief chapbook containing nineteen poems.  Those poems, like these of Between the Thorns, affirm that Appalachia is Allen's primal experience.  Seconding the importance of Appalachia to him is the fact that he founded and serves as president of Appalfolks of America Association, a non-profit organization serving Appalachia and dedicated to improving the literacy and drop-out rate by promoting drug-free creativity in literacy and performing arts.

"Writing", Allen says, "provides me with a stay against the madness of this world."  He thinks of himself as "an image maker" and his writing as his "umbilical link to the world" that both reconstructs his perceptions and strips away superficiality.  His down-home voice vividly rises above the winds of time as he retraces his passage through time, space, and memory to recreate an intimate and immediate reality.

Allen's restlessness and resignation, his deep-rooted melancholy and hope, echoes every human's search for meaning.  His poetry captures his center of being with a familiar tenderness and pictures for us a human experience we recognize as our own.  "I write," Allen states, "because to do otherwise would be to accept defeat."