Paola Corso’s Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, a review by Karen Weyant

Pittsburgh has been called the “City of Bridges.” But it should be also called the “City of Steps,” as the neighborhoods are connected by staircases: some made of wood, some made of concrete, but all an important part of history. It’s this vertical landscape that Paola Corso explores in her newest book Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps.

Corso opens her book by defining steps and stairways through three simple words: ascent, longing, and incremental. She then moves on to a poem titled “Beginnings” which outlines various points in Pittsburgh’s history. For instance, in one stanza she notes, that there were wooden steps until “WPA workers” during the Great Depression “dig up sandstone/and haul on horse-drawn wagons/cracking the whip/all the way to a hillside.”

From that poem on, Corso uses archived photographs of different staircases in Pittsburgh. Some photographs show rickety wooden steps that zig-zag down the mountains. Others show concrete blocks that line alleys and streets. Poems are intertwined between the photographs. Some of the poems outline Pittsburgh’s history while others force the reader to travel beyond the city limits to other staircases in the world, all the while reminding us that steps and stories are key ways that we are all connected.

Corso’s book is a celebration of steps, that is true, but in many ways, it’s more of a celebration of those who use them – of workers who made their way up and down Pittsburgh’s hills to their places of work in the mills, of little boys trading baseball cards while balancing on the hillsides, of today’s tourists who climb for a better view of a beautiful city.

It’s certainly a world that we all need to know about, especially when we find ourselves climbing similar stairs.