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...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
