One House Down

The candid poems in Gianna Russo's One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today--then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems. —Jeff Klinkenberg, author of Son of Real Florida: Stories from my Life and recipient of the Florida Humanities Council Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing Gianna Russo’s One House Down shows a poet of true lyricism and storytelling gifts and remarkable range. A Tampa, Florida native, Russo explores being Southern and Italian. She digs out the “other” side of Tampa, the part once chic and that then took a fall to the tawdry. She combines a pastoral “[lying]down into daisy light” with the urban realism of “Pay-Day loans and pawnshops.” With elegance, Russo smashes up days past when “Tampa was a 45 record” against “the new interstate” which carved up the old neighborhoods. She reminisces about streets where on one end was “white trash” and on the other end Italians. A childhood presses up against sexuality, racism, hurricanes, and the sumptuous imagery of an almost lost Florida west coast. She embraces all of it with grief, grit, guile and tenderness. —Mary Jane Ryals, Poet Laureate of the Big Bend of Florida and author of Cookie and Me Gianna Russo is a Tampa native and third generation Floridian. She is the author of Moonflower, winner of the Florida Book Award Bronze and Florida Publishers Association Silver awards. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had publications in Green Mountains Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Tampa Review, Valparaiso, Ekphrasis, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Water Stone, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others. She is founding editor of the Florida poetry chapbook publisher YellowJacket Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tampa. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University where she directs the Sandhill Writers Retreat.