Floating Ships and Sticky Thought
A conversation with Beate Tröger and Allison Pitinii Davis
about writing and publishing poetry criticism
moderated by May Mergenthaler
Allison Pitinii Davis, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry and critic at Ohio State University, and Beate Tröger, acclaimed literary critic from Frankfurt, Germany, and currently Max Kade Visiting Professor at the University of St. Louis, will share and discuss their thoughts about writing poetry reviews for news and literary outlets. Pitinii Davis and Tröger will talk about the reviews of poetry collections that they selected for this occasion and discuss the current situation of poetry and literary criticism in their respective national and international contexts. It is perhaps not a coincidence that both authors chose to discuss poetry that thematizes female labor—factory work and the material aspects of writing—and that take critical social perspectives on capitalism and industrialization, leading to environmental degradation.
Allison Pitinii Davis traces how bodies become the ghosts of economic collapse in Takako Arai’s Factory Girls (2019), and how factory walls penetrate the atmosphere far beyond them in Leslie Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory (2018). Pitinii Davis’ creative review concludes with a cento that combines lines from the two poetry collections, leading to a dialogue between diverging views of female labor.
Beate Tröger finds lost love confronted with the sudden charge of caring for a former partner in Nancy Campbell’s Uneasy Pieces (2022), leading to reflections on how to give a voice to women chemists, printers, painters, and poets. In her FAZ review of Daniela Danz’ Portolan (2025), Tröger follows the freight fallen from container ships down to the bottom of the ocean, where it incites reminiscences of lost hope and the caves of Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra.