WOMAN STRONG by Anna Casamento Arrigo – Poetry, Family & Relationships, Political Strife

Anna Casamento Arrigo’s Woman Strong showcases themes of love, heartbreak, death, disease, and political strife.

In the newly-released audio version, Casamento, with the help of her narrator Valentina Latyna, captures the essence of life and living. Latyna brings these poems to warm, sensuous life. Her accent, at once elegant and romantic, lifts the poems off the page and gives them voice.

The pearls strung into Woman Strong’s beautiful strand of poetry will stun and amaze readers. Many of them speak to the strength of women, as can be expected from the title, but many others talk about the fragile nature of life, of love, and of time.

Each poem explores a theme, some overlapping, and all of them provide the hope that we are strong enough to survive anything.

Casamento’s reminiscences of childhood show a creative mind already at work bending metaphors and figures of speech as she scrapes a knee or witnesses a transgression.

One poem stands out in particular, the three-part “Just Ice.” In part I, it discusses an old woman who is the butt of the neighborhood jokes because she doesn’t like dogs pooping in her yard. Casamento gives this invisible woman a voice and reveals her as human. As a young woman, she brought conversation and blueberry muffins.

The muffins appear again in Part II, where she talks to a veteran in the hospital, who is “between knowing and accepting.” Vincent had fought in a war seeking justice but failed to find it. Instead, he lost his limbs, and now questions justice as he calls it “Just Ice.”

In part III, she enters a church, hoping to find justice when a woman who wears a smile “between knowing and accepting” joins her. “Just Ice” kept repeating in the silence.

Casamento laments that humanity cannot exist in a world filled with just ice.

In “Exorcizing the Monster,” she tells of a day she becomes faceless, and as she writes, she exorcizes the monster, Cancer.

“Woman Strong,” explores hell and heaven separated by a fissure, where Casamento finds herself with an inescapable truth. She grows through the pain of her uncertainty, remembering her art and her passions, which become her solace.

“Clothing Drive” is about mining for memories, and “Wanted Desire” takes us to the edge of sensuality through her masterfully descriptive language.

Her title poem “Woman Strong,” as most of the poems in the collection are, is lyrical and powerful with images of strength as a mother, and the power as a lover to reveal the source of every woman’s strength: perseverance, patience, and love.

Casamento’s thoughtful words come clearly through Latyna’s heart-felt and skilled readings.

Take this collection of poems with you on your next long walk. You won’t be sorry.