PAOLA CORSO

poet, photographer, activist

DEATH BY RENAISSANCE

Poems by Paola Corso Photographs by George Thomas Mendel

(Bottom Dog Press, 2004)

"Paola Corso's poems are tough, edgy, often unsettling—populated with tender sinners and tough-as-nails saints. She blends the political with the mythic, family life with social annotations, to create an urgent and compelling collection. 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 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

"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

"Personal poems that make the sounds of an entire community."—FRA NOI

"...Paola Corso’s Pittsburgh through-and-through. The Italian immigrants there finds in her poetry a mythological home more bleak than most, but suffused with humor.”—NEW YORK PRESS

"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

"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restoring the reader to meanings and location and shift the nature of the book from poetry collection to scrapbook to historical document."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

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