Paola Corso has made a poetic and photographic paean to the 739 stairways that punctuate the landscape of her beloved home city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The book is also an extended meditation on the spiritual, philosophical, historical, architectural, metaphoric, and aesthetic power of stairs. As the title suggests, stairways are more than a physical feature of a building or a practical means of conveyance—they are an ingenious method of joining people and places that might otherwise remain isolated, alienated, and unreachable. The many “vertical bridges” celebrated in these poems are aspirational, connecting the lives, labors, and loves of the human beings that climb them and connecting their pasts and their presents with the future they bravely step into. In the course of 32 well-crafted poems, accompanied by 33 powerful black-and-white photos (25 of them archival, 8 of them taken by the author), Corso evokes the gritty stairways of Pittsburgh and the storied stairways from around the world—from Rome's Spanish Steps to Odessa's Primorsky Stairs; from India's Chand Baori Stepwell, where women carry water from the well to their village, to “Love's Ladder” in Chongqing, China, carved into a mountainside by a man for his beloved so they might ascend to a new home far from judgmental villagers; from nameless steps in the Bronx where neighborhood children play to the famed “Rocky” steps of Philadelphia that the poet ascends in her own victory jog. Indeed, stairs are the stars of Corso's book, so much so that the reader wonders why she only now realizes how beautiful and powerful a metaphor an ordinary staircase is for human desire.Vertical Bridges also serves as a species of autobiography as Corso's poems tell the story of her Calabrian family's immigration to Pittsburgh and the ways in which the histories of the city and the family intertwine. Honoring her grandfather's trade as a stone mason, she writes movingly of the immigrantwho came herehis chisel and his malletto build these stairswith concrete fistsShe tells of her father who climbed the hillside steps to work on the labor gang even as he “set his sights ahead,” eventually becoming a tail gunner in World War II, a college graduate, and a white-collar school administrator. Finally, she tells of her own immigrant son, a four-year-old adopted and brought from Guatemala to New York, where she lived for a time before returning her family to Pittsburgh, the poet's place of origin, trading “New York's grid” for “Pittsburgh's grade.” Using the metaphor of the stairs, she describes her role in the family drama elegantly: “I, the daughter and mother of immigrants, a generation / between, the riser connecting the lives they were to tread.” This history she narrates in verse is made vivid by the vintage photographs the poet incorporates into the collection, a montage of poignant images depicting immigrants building the stairways and ordinary people climbing them.Corso's poetry is lyrical, as well as narrative, in impulse. Visually arresting and formally engaging, the poems make the most of the book's primary trope. In these suggestive typographical arrangements of language, words and letters become steps, poems become bridges and stairways, bringing poet and reader to “the middle ground where we meet.” That middle ground is made powerfully evident in one of the last poems in the book, “Of Stone and Light”: My foot steps s t o n e t h g i l touchesMy soulThe first stanza reads downward, “My foot steps stone,” while the second stanza reads from the bottom up, “My soul touches light.” The two stanzas meet in the middle, as if the center were the landing on a staircase. Corso's staircase of words connects the contraries of body and soul, substance and spirit. The downward movement suggests descent into particularity—the world, history, physicality—whereas the upward movement is aspirational, like the book as a whole, ascending to the realm of possibility and inviting the reader along. The formal wit visually embodies the central theme and the governing concept of the collection, bringing together, letter by letter, the contraries that define the circumstances of human life—body and soul, past and future, matter and spirit—the stuff we are and the starry sky to which we aspire.
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Oct 15, 2024
Alfian Qori Irsandi 
Open Access
