Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Red Ochre) - Softcover

Pitinii Davis, Allison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936097133 ISBN 13: 9781936097135

Publisher: Baobab Press, 2017

Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD (BERRU AWARD)
 
FINALIST FOR THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARD
 
Two families immigrate to America's Steel Valley and open a trucking motel and laundry. The businesses change hands through three generations as the region's industry booms and busts. When the two disparate families become one, the new generation must examine what it means to endure in a place, a culture, a language, and a history. Line Study of a Motel Clerk examines a family's century-long effort to make a home in a world on the move.

About this title

About the Author

Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Black Warrior Review, CutBank, Connotation Press, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and will spend 2015–2016 as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was raised near Youngstown, Ohio.

From the Back Cover

"In Line Study of a Motel Clerk, Allison Pitinii Davis explores the complicated intersections among ethnicity, family, work, and loss that shaped the culture of Youngstown. The language and images are specific, and while some readers may well recall their own visits to the steel museum or the sounds of local bands and radio stations, these poems are not merely local. Instead, they invite us to think about the meaning of place--about how we come to be in particular places and how our lives are shaped by those who came earlier, from other places. These poems remind us that a sense of place is rooted in family stories, in the material spaces of small businesses and local bars, in words and memories."

--SHERRY LEE LINKON, author of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (University Press of Kansas)

"This book refuses the notion that poetry is an enterprise of the elite. In Line Study of a Motel Clerk, interstate truck drivers, laundrymen, and desk clerks have as much wisdom and beauty to offer as Reznikoff, Spinoza, and Mayakovsky. Allison Pitinii Davis knows that the poet, too is a worker, "straightening / endings and beginnings / into a line." As a daughter of converging diasporas, she is a "great bearer of keys," opening doors to a family history that reveals the links between language and survival, between past and present, between the personal and the political. This is vital poetry of the working class, for whom "Saying nothing's beyond / our means."... Davis does more than pay tribute to her home, a place shrouded in dark myth: she dives into the wreck, questions her place there, and pulls up the truth."

--ROCHELLE HURT, author of The Rusted City (White Pine Press)

"In this unforgettable debut, Allison Pitinii Davis tells the American story of two immigrant families: the Jews own a Rust Belt motel, the Greeks run a laundry; they ultimately merge to create the speaker of these eloquent, unsentimental poems, that remind me so happily of William Carlos Williams and Philip Levine. Line Study of a Motel Clerk is a story of transience and love--"the heart of it all + a free beer"--of looking almost too closely, forward through the windshield and back into the past. "There is a way to love things open," Davis writes of the duplicate keys that hang at the Youngstown motel, awaiting the hands of temporary guests, "perfect copies/cutout//for their work." Davis's story is likewise familiar--but in her hands, loving and brand new."

--KATHY FAGAN, author of Sycamore (Milkweed Editions)

Edition details

• Publisher: Baobab Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1936097133
• ISBN 13: 9781936097135
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 87