Paola Corso
Copyright © 2013 Paola Corso. All Rights Reserved.
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DEATH BY RENAISSANCE
Poems by Paola Corso
Photographs by George Thomas Mendel
"Paola Corso's poems are tough, edgy, often
unsettling—populated with tender sinners and tough-
as-nail saints. 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, author of Queen for a Day:
Selected and New Poems
"Few books address the anxiety of moving between classes and the assimilation of
second-generation immigrants with such urgency and poetic capability as Paola Corso's
first collection of poems Death by Renaissance."
—The Indiana Review
"Poems drawn out like monologues from an Italian John Wideman, Corso's work
captures the voice and rhythms of her remembered world."
—Pittsburgh Magazine
“...Corso’s Pittsburgh through-and-through. The Italian immigrant community there
finds in her poetry a mythological home more bleak than most, but suffused with a
humor that’s all too rare to poetry these days.”
—New York Press
"Personal poems that make the sounds of an entire community."
—Fra Noi
"Refusing to be too easily understood, these poems demand and amply repay repeated
reading."
—Michael Palma, author of A Fortune in Gold, Inferno: A New Verse Translation
"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, Literary Review Editor Emeritus
"A welcome addition to working-class literature."
—Patricia Dobler, author of Collected Poems
"Like Corso's poems, George Thomas Mendel's documentary photos of the Pittsburgh
area today revel in shaking up and restoring the reader to meanings and location and
shift the nature of the book from poetry collection to scrapbook to historical
document."
—Italian Americana
Read an Excerpt or view George Thomas Mendel's photos.
Read a Press Feature.
unsettling—populated with tender sinners and tough-
as-nail saints. 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, author of Queen for a Day:
Selected and New Poems
"Few books address the anxiety of moving between classes and the assimilation of
second-generation immigrants with such urgency and poetic capability as Paola Corso's
first collection of poems Death by Renaissance."
—The Indiana Review
"Poems drawn out like monologues from an Italian John Wideman, Corso's work
captures the voice and rhythms of her remembered world."
—Pittsburgh Magazine
“...Corso’s Pittsburgh through-and-through. The Italian immigrant community there
finds in her poetry a mythological home more bleak than most, but suffused with a
humor that’s all too rare to poetry these days.”
—New York Press
"Personal poems that make the sounds of an entire community."
—Fra Noi
"Refusing to be too easily understood, these poems demand and amply repay repeated
reading."
—Michael Palma, author of A Fortune in Gold, Inferno: A New Verse Translation
"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, Literary Review Editor Emeritus
"A welcome addition to working-class literature."
—Patricia Dobler, author of Collected Poems
"Like Corso's poems, George Thomas Mendel's documentary photos of the Pittsburgh
area today revel in shaking up and restoring the reader to meanings and location and
shift the nature of the book from poetry collection to scrapbook to historical
document."
—Italian Americana
Read an Excerpt or view George Thomas Mendel's photos.
Read a Press Feature.
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