PAOLA CORSO
poet, photographer, activist
poet, photographer, activist
OXYGEN FOR TWO: THE END OF A TRILOGY
(Bordighera Press, Fall 2026)
Oxygen for Two is the last of Paola Corso’s Pittsburgh air trilogy. Once I was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing features the first known deaths due to air pollution in 1948 when an inversion trapped smoke and fumes from the zinc and iron works in Donora, south of Pittsburgh. The Laundress Catches Her Breath explores urban working life in the grimy world of factory and clothesline. Oxygen for Two is set in a polluted Pittsburgh of the narrator’s youth and her father sharing his every breath with the cancer in his lungs. As the city becomes greener, public steps—initially built for steel workers to commute from their houses on the hill to mills along the riverbanks—are now climbed for exercise, scenic views, and lower carbon footprints. Oxygen for Two examines how a patriarch’s death impels family and love relationships to evolve along with their city from a harmful influence to a spirit of life-giving.
In Oxygen for Two, Paola Corso climbs her way step by step between countries and generations. At each landing is her Italian immigrant father and the Pittsburgh that bore her and infused his lungs with cancer. She explains, "[t]he smokestack was our church steeple." Mill soot and "dust meant jobs." Children "live[d] and die[d] on fumes of steel." In this powerful collection, poetic images converse with footnotes on ozone pollution and burial practices. Meditations on Guatemala, Brooklyn, caregiving, and the poet's sons widen the lens on heritage. Part ode, part lament, part travelogue, Oxygen for Two gives us what we "wish for in the air between us." Breathe it in.
—MARJORIE MADDOX, author of Hover Here and co-editor of Keystone Poetry
Who speaks for the air? asks the speaker in Paola Corso's Oxygen for Two, and the answer is obvious: the poet does. For air and of air and also of family and grief and love and location. From the sooty streets of a bygone Pittsburgh to modern muscles climbing her crumbling city steps. From the mills of Braddock and Hazelwood, to Brooklyn, to Calabria, to a restaurant in Guadalajara, Corso takes us all over the layered, hard-working world of her lineage. Choked with the smoke of industry and cigarettes, the miasma of grief and loss, the speaker of these poems is somehow still breathing deeply—“Oxygen seeps through the pores of my skin, my body light and airy”—as she recounts her father’s illness and death from lung cancer. Grounded in place, in time and in relationship, these poems are dense as jewels mined from rich earth yet also light as a cleansing, exhaling breath. Beautiful and necessary and lasting."
—SHEILA SQUILLANTE, author of Flor/elegy, Mostly Human and Beautiful Nerve
Copyright © 2020-2025 Paola Corso. All Rights Reserved.