Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Anna Casamento-Arrigo

  • TESSY TURTLE by Anna Casamento Arrigo, Illustrated by Jryona – Children’s Picture Books, Marine Life, Climate Change

     

    “We are turtles, one and all, in oceans and on land. But we’re in danger of dying if you don’t lend a hand!” warns Anna Casamento Arrigo in her heartwarming children’s book, Tessy Turtle.

    Sweet Tessy, along with her underwater friends, explains the life cycles of sea turtles and the environmental hazards they face daily due to their most dangerous predator: human beings. Written in lilting rhyme with vibrant illustrations on every page, Tessy Turtle captures the hearts of the young and not-so-young, reminding readers of our responsibility to the living beings and ecosystems we live amongst.

    As readers swim beside tour guide Tessy, she points out the symbiotic relationships and friendships of sea life.

    Barnacles cling to the backs of turtles for safety and turtles eat long green seagrass to keep it from growing unmanageable and disrupting other sea life from hunting. Tessy also exposes environmental barriers to the underwater critters’ happy lives, such as pollution and over-fishing.

    Through story and rhyme, Tessy Turtle promotes positive conversations around climate action and encourages little ones to make a difference in their worlds.

    Tessy provides young readers with examples of simple preventative measures– such as picking up after themselves at public beaches and avoiding touching the little green creatures– to encourage a safer world for all living things.

    Anna Casamento Arrigo invites empathy and challenges readers to take action in this beautiful sing-song lesson on marine life. Tessy Turtle is sure to spark little readers’ imaginations and stick to their hearts like a barnacle.

     

    5 Stars! Best Book Chanticleer Book Reviews

  • COLIN And The LEGEND Of The WEEPING WILLOW by Anna Casamento Arrigo – Children’s Picture Books, Native American Legends

    In Colin and the Legend of the Weeping Willow by Anna Casamento-Arrigo, curious Colin learns a Native American legend about the Weeping Willow from one of his favorite people, his grandmother.

    Across the years, people have shared their cultural legends and tales. Often these stories are told to explain phenomena in the natural world, and are passed down by elders through oral traditions.

    In this story, Colin visits his grandparents to join in fun activities like baking cupcakes and playing catch.  During the cupcake making, he shares with his grandma that he has been learning about Native American legends, and she takes the opportunity to tell him another Native story.

    As Colin and Grandma sit under a willow, she shares the story of how the willow came to be called “weeping”.

    She introduces Colin to some heritage, practices, and values of the tribe whose story she borrowed, while telling him about the variety of Native Tribes that were here before the explorers came.

    The beautiful illustrations of Gabriel Parame show how Colin imagines his grandmother’s story, including a fun tie-in to the legend that Colin and his grandma get to experience at the end.

    Colin and the Legend of the Weeping Willow is a perfect story for a grandmother– or grandfather– to read to a child and continue the tradition of sharing legends throughout the generations.

     

    5 Stars! Best Book Chanticleer Book Reviews

  • 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.

       

      5 Stars! Best Book Chanticleer Book Reviews

    • PATIENCE INSANITY And WISDOM by Anna Casamento Arrigo – Poetry, Family & Relationships, Mental Health

      Patience Insanity and Wisdom, Anna Casamento Arrigo’s poetry collection, dances seamlessly between reflective, philosophical, whimsical, colorful, and especially therapeutic.

      In her author bio, Arrigo shares that she turned to poetry as part of her recovery from a stroke. This gives a glimpse into the true depth of these poems, which offer healing to the reader as well. Arrigo deals with issues of love and loss, depression and survival, and life itself. Her poems carry the echo of her struggle, softly alluded to, but not blatantly laid bare.

      Arrigo’s poems take the reader through our shared human experiences. “I am enough” and “I am here” lay between “In Silence”. “Insanity” shares a painful childhood, “A constant stream of hateful words/slurred/rising from a golden whiskey tumbler.” “Wizard Wings” reflects on growing up, “From my toddler years/Through that period when neither girl nor woman be-.” “One soul” shares the joy and bittersweetness of the parent-child relationship, “it was not too long ago You held my hand/ Precious memories and hugs/One Soul We two/Divided in half.”

      “Just Another Birth Day” brings full circle the impact of the loss of one’s mother, “yesterday a mom celebrated her 68th birthday in heaven,” and yet, her continued presence in her children’s lives continues on, “Listen my dear children to the sound of the wind/ I’m there./Watch as dawn sips the darkness away./ I’m there/ Reach out and touch the roses-/comforted in essence of their being/ I’m there. I’m there/Speak my name/ Mom?/’I’m here’.”

      Patience Insanity and Wisdom does not shy away from the realities of grappling with life.

      “Depression” has this subtitle: “A dedication to the far too many who wear the mask. You are NOT alone,” empathizing with this common, yet hidden experience, “Waiting for those daily doses of ‘Happy Pills’/To bring my soul back to me-/For year/So many years…” and “Depression is not contagious-/Remove your mask!”

      “Hold On!” is a shout of encouragement, acknowledging the struggle for some with suicide awareness, “days when everything hurts -Wishing you would disappear…There will be day/ Of fighting back/Standing up/Holding on.”

      “Holding on Letting go” starts with the line, “It hadn’t been an easy death. But the will to die was less than my will…to survive […] Holding on/Letting go/A separation/Decisive/And in eternities bound…/Where my projected self-free falls/Letting go.”

      The poems share pages with Arrigo’s art, mostly impressionistic compositions with a wonderful mingling of bright and cool colors.

      To add to this experience, Arrigo partnered with musician Paul Simeone, setting some of these poems to music videos which can be found on YouTube and SoundCloud. Patience Insanity and Wisdom is like a dessert cart in a favorite restaurant, with poems that should be taken in small portions and savored to enjoy them fully.

       

      5 Star Best Book Chanticleer Reviews round silver sticker

    • PETALS by Anna Casamento Arrigo – Poetry Collections, Family Life, Memory

       

      Anna Casamento Arrigo tells of longing, memory, and lingering pain through verdant imagery and mythological metaphor in Petals, a poetry collection.

      Poems such as “Life Speaks Loudly” and “Time Too Quickly” establish a focus on the ever-changing seasons, and the power of time to both take away from someone and transform them. Arrigo’s work here is a remembrance of those things gone to the past, both the beautiful and the awful. “A Slow Dance in the Summer Rain” shows the weight of loving memories, while “Treading” reaches for the dreams of childhood, before they were stamped out by the struggles of life.

      These poems use vibrant sensory descriptions – especially of the natural world – which ground the heightened emotions to allow readers to connect with them. In fact, readers can listen to some of these poems in musical form on Arrigo’s YouTube channel.

      Petals grapples with family and identity in “Who Am I” & “Nonno’s Orchard”, grief over a lost father in “Daddy’s Flower”, and a yearning for connection in “Wrapped in Your Heart”. These themes meld with one another to give a complete sense of loss. Certain intimate details, such as a specific jacket or kind of flower, recur throughout the book. Readers will begin to recognize these motifs, creating a familiarity that will open them to deeper sorrow and joy.

      Arrigo explores a sense of being adrift in the world, unsure of even one’s own self.

      “Hey Child!” and “More than Now” insist that, even while adrift, there is a powerful urge to act – to take in the world. “My Naked Soul” dalliances with the very cosmos, while “Hollow Men” and “The Reality” use mythology to interrogate how people see themselves, and whether their eyes are clear when they do so.

      This sense of interrogation continues, growing into the biblical reckoning of “The Gatekeeper” and the menace of “The Red Knight”. Greed, injustice, and faith intertwine in these poems as Petals sets its sights on those who have used and abused their fellow people and the world around them.

      A strong rhythm carries Petals along, with a back-and-forth of long lines and short, as well as comforting and tumultuous emotion.

      Arrigo uses occasional formatting changes to make poems such as “The Night Warrior” striking while maintaining a broadly consistent style.

      The likewise consistent through-line of reminiscence lends itself well to stark tonal shifts, as these poems hold tight to memories of love, fear, and grief alike. “Sounds and Silent Seas” calls out to the past, asking it to open a path of reunion while indulging in the beauty of what once was. “TOO!” speaks instead of escape, flying away from the darkness of childhood.

      And yet, a person can’t let memory consume them, not while they have a present. “Now” stands as an answer to the past ­– for all of its wonderful and terrible power, it only exists through the lens of what is now.

      Through careful description and dedication to the impact of memory, Petals creates a cohesive and affecting collection of poems.

       

       

      5 Stars! Best Book Chanticleer Book Reviews

    • A CHILD’S LOVE by Anna Casamento-Arrigo – Picture Books, Children’s Family Books, Family Life Fiction

      Anna Casamento-Arrigo’s A Child’s Love is a heartwarming story that pays tribute to the loving relationship between a mother and her daughter.

      This circle-of-life tale begins with a mother caring for her infant. The poetic storyline unfolds into a role reversal of caregiving from one generation to the next.

      As the decades pass, the reader sees the child nurtured gracefully into adulthood and eventually become a parent herself. As time takes its toll, the now-grown daughter and grandchild become caretakers for the aging mother. From lullabies and games of peek-a-boo to walkers, wheelchairs, and visits to the hospital, the love and care the mother once showed to her daughter is now reflected in the daughter’s equal concern and consideration. With the granddaughter, Casamento-Arrigo introduces a third generation to show the continuation of this cycle of kin.

      Alex Martinez’ endearing illustrations help define the genuine love and affection between these family members, and the changing needs within each generation as time passes.

      Demonstrated again and again in tender detail, with the large and small footprints in the sand as mother and daughter walk hand-in-hand along the shoreline, in the daughter’s last backward glance at her loving home while heading into the wider world with all her belongings, and with the daughter’s recollection of her mom keeping the scary monsters at bay in the closet. The images are solid, genuine, and artfully crafted.

      The narrative is composed of simple rhyming lines, each reflective of the preceding illustration’s activity, and should particularly appeal to younger readers.

      While intended as a children’s book, A Child’s Love is a beautiful story to be shared by parents, grandparents, and children of all ages. The lasting sentiment is clearly one of love and compassion for those we care about within the familiar bonds between generations.