The Laundress Catches Her Breath

This powerful collection of poetry features a chain-smoking, working-class Italian American woman struggling to support herself and find meaningful work in a depressed mill town. She endures the indignity of a low-paid job that she can’t afford to leave. The poems follow her tumultuous relationship with her father, a retired mill worker, her love for her educated uncle dying of cancer, and her escape from this soiled life through her ritual of doing laundry.'

Paola Corso is the author of 7 poetry and fiction books set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family found work in the steel mills. Most recent are The Laundress Catches Her Breath (CavanKerry Press, 2012), winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not Breathing, winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award, and her forthcoming collection Vertical Bridges: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of City Steps. Her nonfiction has appeared in venues such as The New York Times, Women’s Review of Books, and U.S. Catholic. Writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and inclusion on Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Cultural and Literary Map.  A literary activist, Corso is co-founder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a poetry and art project celebrating city steps. She is a member of Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Collective who exhibits her photographs in libraries, galleries, and open studios. She divides her time between New York City where she is on the English Department Faculty at Touro College and Pittsburgh. paolacorso.com

Paola Corso’s The Laundress Catches Her Breath focuses like a Leica on the details of daily urban working class life from a fiercely rendered narrative perspective. Pioneering a mode of tough yet poignant documentary verse, Corso draws us into the grainy, grimy world of factory and clothesline, diner and lung disease and filthy water with extraordinary skill. Her collection is in fact breathtaking.
— Sandra M. Gilbert

In The Laundress Catches Her Breath, Paola Corso takes us inside the world of the union card and the steel mill. This daughter of Pittsburgh recalls the black smoke that filled the skies of the city, how  it breeds a tough voice: …I could do my old man’s job. I got muscles… Corso reminds us that what we breathe in is what we breathe out—as she writes the nature of work: By the time she pins/the last of the load on the line/the first hung is dirty again.
— Jan Beatty

The Laundress Catches her Breath makes me think of William Carlos Williams and his Paterson–at least his politics and mythic stranger bits.  But this book is set in and around Pittsburgh, where a part-time waitress with no health insurance still lives at home and washes her father’s mill-filthy work clothes.  She smokes like the stacks and covets his union card until the black Madonna of Tindari speaks to her from the Maytag, “Light is matter and darkness is pure spirit.”  O, oygen’s lively incarnation, takes her on a tour of industrial destruction, from the Pennsylvania mill towns to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, and the laundress finally sees what workers need most immediately:  a little fresh air.  This is song of lament for all labor and the earth made outrageous with a magical imagination.  It is a crazy, gorgeously-crafted romance of the American worker.  And just the thing for these evil times.
— Julie Kasdorf

September 2012
90 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-32-7