Craft Talk: Poets Allison Pitinii Davis and Ryan Walsh
Baobab Press’s new literary imprint, Red Ochre, is devoted to elevating voices that rescript our conceptions of identity and place. The imprint launched with Allison Pitinii Davis’s 2017 poetry collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award’s Berru Award for Poetry and the Ohioana Book Award. The collection examines a family’s century-long effort to make a home in a changing world, with all the grit, beauty and truth of the working-class immigrant struggle. This February, we’ll release Reckonings, the debut poetry collection by Ryan Walsh that interrogates the dissolution of American industry and rural community.
Since these collections share interesting thematic intersections, we recently asked Pitinii Davis and Walsh to sit down for a craft talk. They asked each other about place-specific poetry, about artistic inspiration, about the ethical implications surrounding their work, about the capacious power of poetry, and much more.