Death by Renaissance

Created to accompany the poetry of Paola Corso for the book Death by Renaissance (Bottom Dog Press, 2004), this original collection of photographs explores life along the rivers of Pittsburgh, in areas where steel mills have ceded their past dominance yet life continues.

Praise for Death by Renaissance:

Paola Corso’s poems are tough, edgy, often unsettling—populated with tender sinners and tough-as-nail saints. In her full-length debut, Death by Renaissance, she blends the political with the mythic, family life with social annotations, to create an urgent and compelling collection. Corso’s hardships and joys are palpable in each of her poems. She is a poet we root for!
—Denise Duhamel

Varied in sound, form, and voice, Corso’s poems are united by a vivid immediacy of people and place and an elegiac core. Through the rhythms of machinery, speech, memory, and human interaction, she makes us realize the vitality we lose when a community dies.
—Walter Cummins

Death by Renaissance evokes and invokes a time that is gone and a place that is becoming unrecognizable. Powerful currents run through this book—anger, love for a community, commemoration of their way of life. Refusing to be too easily understood, the best of these poems demand and amply repay repeated reading.
—Michael Palma

Corso’s sympathetic voice evokes post-industrial Pittsburgh with its detritus of old women and boarded-up greengrocers, a Pittsburgh that’s missed the high-tech revolution. But unlike an exercise in nostalgia, the poems capture the tastes, sounds and smells of a lively Italian family’s work-oriented life, with its joys and sorrows. A welcome addition to working-class literature.
—Patricia Dobler

Bio:
Paola Corso was born in a Pittsburgh river town where her Italian immigrant father and grandfather worked in the steel mill. She earned a B.A. from Boston College and a master’s degree from the City College of New York-CUNY where she won the Dejur Award for Creative Writing. She is a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow, the 2003 Bordighera Poetry Prize First Runner-up chosen by Donna Masini, and author of the Pudding House chapbook A Proper Burial. Her poems have appeared in Italian Americana, The Progressive, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Women’s Studies Quarterly, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. She has read her fiction and poetry at Nuyorican Poets Cafe, New York Public Library, Grand Central Station, and elsewhere. As a member of the National Endowment for the Arts WritersCorps and the National Writers Union Community Writing Project, she led creative writing workshops in New York City hospitals, senior centers, and women's shelters. Currently, she teaches a creative writing workshop at Fordham University in New York City as well as at writing conferences throughout the country. Contact her at paola_corso@hotmail.com.

Exhaustion

if she could use
her hands to fasten
a button twist a knob
scribble a letter
to tell me she dreams

about tailpipes
thirteen parts assembled
again and over
like a broken dance
of two palms

stroking rubbery backs
fingers bowing
to partners swollen
with gnarled collapse
snapping delicate cylinders

joints in place
for the socket and bend of it
as she dismantles her own
one occupation at a time

even before they tell her
with owning fists
to speed the quota
because flesh is thick
in a town that has no fire

just cold furnaces
and breadsinners
with lottery eyes or
bingo on their breath

so where can she go
if the work of her hands
is meant for reaching
the grasp of all things falling

—Paola Corso
Death by Renaissance (Bottom Dog Press, Feb. 2004)

River Crossing

I.
Stronghold of mill Hunk
of hard hat and shovel
muscling water’s edge
pockets of flexed gray
shift with union 8 to 4

II.
Warm from sacrifice
from gutted insides
of fire-eating ingot
offered at holy altar
to blood-thickening shallow

III.
Pierced by heavy noise
by spiral breaking surface
like one last gloaming stone
spinning reckless, sinking bottom
as fish float downstream

IV.
Stuck in mud
in stagnant breaths of clay
masking alluvial bottom
from harbored stillness
set in bone

V.
Jostled out of somnolence
out of long closing breeze
awakened to smothering dream
hot clouds and fast rain
without subtlety of womb

VI.
Teeming with motor boats
with engines chop-shopping waves
to boardwalk gamblers placing
lanterned bets with hands
patted dry on paper money

VII.
Peeling off another ocean
another sea growing younger
a lake not yet born
fishing for a conceivable pool
to die again unknowing

—Paola Corso
Death by Renaissance (Bottom Dog Press, February 2004)