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Death by Renaissance by Paola Corso (January 2004) 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 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 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 Excerpts from Death By Renaissance
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