Florida Avenue Torch Song
Date
2017-06-15
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MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa
Abstract
How do we love home when home includes ugliness? Can we treasure a place whose history, values and politics have supported injustice and suffering? And if those societal wrongs are still evident today—then what? Florida Avenue Torch Song, a collection of 56 mostly free verse, lyric-narrative poems, attempts an answer. Here, home is the South generally, and Tampa, Florida, specifically. Russo, a Tampa native, examines her own culpability in accepting a host of biases and, in doing so, forces us to examine our own. The collection is peopled with the working class and working poor, those who’ve just made it and those who are still struggling. At the same time, these poems set mostly in Tampa’s iconic old neighborhoods and along its historic thoroughfares, acknowledge everyday goodness and celebrate backyard beauty. Ranging over personal experience, historical events, and today’s socio-political issues, ultimately these poems bear witness to a century in Tampa. The poems in Florida Avenue Torch Song urge us to question our attachment to the places we cherish and to each other with compassion and candor.
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Poetry, Tampa, Free verse