STELLA CORSO
ABOUT
Stella Corso is the author of the poetry collections Green Knife (Rescue Press, 2023) and TANTRUM (Rescue Press, 2017), selected by Douglas Kearney for the Black Box Prize, along with the chapbooks Taboo Vivant (blush lit, 2022) and Wind & the Augur (Sixth Finch, 2021). She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets' Theater (CRVPT) and the current Managing Editor of Denver Quarterly and FIVES.
GREEN KNIFE
October 24, 2023
Framed on the wall of our mordant modern living, Stella Corso’s evocative second collection, Green Knife, hangs firmly askew. In this annular and focused suite of poems, the flaneur’s gaze is provoked by—and attuned to—its caustic surroundings: a therapist comparing their client to a painting; a subject reflecting on numerous imagined projections; our speaker walking around and around it all (as if in an exhibition hall), cataloguing how humanity's absurdity shifts and blooms based on the eye’s moods. With humor and heart, and with an acerbically piercing tone, Corso claims the world “is alive and well. If you care / to look." We just have to be willing to “submit to the image // with courage.”
TANTRUM
November 1, 2017
Like the most formidable silver-screen comediennes, Stella Corso’s debut collection Tantrum is at once incisive and generous, candid and performative, full of coos and barbed truths. “I like that I can be a little dumb with you,” one poem murmurs before delivering a shattering assessment of a woman undermined by her lover. Wry and deliberately feminine, Tantrum makes a riposte to many things: capitalism, chauvinism, even William Carlos Williams. (Reading this book is a bit like watching Corso teasingly feed Williams the plums pilfered from the icebox, pits and all.) Self-possessed, self-indicting, Corso’s speakers unflinchingly explore the complex of rights and wrongs undergirding contemporary first-world femininity: “I turned away from my ambivalence / toward my proof, my receipt // I said I’m sorry / I am just a woman on vacation // I knew all events had led up to this.” Corso’s lively eye also inspects the mesh of nature and performance, art and decadence, ideas and things: “I go out into the field in my bikini / though there is no one there to see me,” “I put on my sleep mask / and see stars.”
UPCOMING READINGS & WORKSHOPS
10/6/2023, Greenfield, MA @ Looky Here: Rescue/Everybody Big Book Launch and Reading, 6pm (w/Jed Munson, Jennifer Robertson, Riley Mac, Deja Carr, Vanessa Brewster)
10/8/2023, Greenfield, MA @ Looky Here: Binging the Syntax: A Workshop for Greedy, Horny Sentences, 2-4pm, register here
10/9/2023, Brooklyn, NY @ Unnameable Books: Book Launch & Reading (w/Jed Munson, Rachel James, sadé powell) 7pm
10/14/2023, Denver, CO @ Lost Greens Farm: Book Launch & Reading (w/Leah Nieboer, Samuel Jesse Jones, Jason Lipeles) 3pm
11/12/2023, online @ Vocational Poetics: Binging the Syntax: A Workshop for Greedy Horny Sentences, 6-8 MT, sliding scale
2/7/2024, Kansas City, MO @ 21st Century Hotel and Gallery, AWP Offsite Reading w/ Sprung Formal, Bear Review, Lmnl Lit, Mississippi Review
2/8/2024, Kansas City, MO @ 21st Century Hotel and Gallery, AWP Offsite Reading w/ Rescue Press, CSU Poetry Center, Windfall Room, and Birds LLC
3/1/2024, Cleveland, OH @ CSU Poetry Center, Lighthouse Reading Series w/ Hussain Ahmed
4/19/2024, New Orleans, LA @ New Orleans Poetry Festival, Soft Clock Reading, 10pm
4/20/2024, New Orleans, LA @ New Orleans Poetry Festival, "Writing Intimacy" Workshop w/ Leah Nieboer, 3pm
4/21/2024, New Orleans, LA @ New Orleans Poetry Festival, Mercury Firs Reading, St. Roch Tavern, 3pm
5/20/2024, Los Angeles, CA @ Poetic Research Bureau w/ Rosie Stockton & Giulia Bencivenga Schneiderman, 7pm
6/17/2024, Boulder, CO @ Naropa Summer Writing Program (Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics), MFA Lecture, 2pm
RECENT WORK
XV (Annulet)
Copies (Not For Resale)
3 Poems from Green Knife (Iterant)
2 Poems from Green Knife (Blush Lit)
1 Poem from Green Knife (Sixth Finch)
4 Poems from Wind & the Augur (Fanzine)
Poetry Manuscript Consultations
Rates: $2/per page (min. $50)
Please send a message to inquire
CONTACT
