Maria uses a spell to detect the Cardinal's love and it pulls across the sea to America where Anne-Marie reveals that she respected his vows and his love--she never forgot and never took another love. The Cat Lady is able to let him know before he dies, after which the feral cats of Rome lead Mezzaluna to his afterlife. The gattara or cat lady is a part of Roman history. These are people that help feed the population of cats in Roman public spaces. In this story it follows the life of cats within the care of a lady named Maria. A cat named Queen Bast has 3 kittens and is talking to Maria about them. After the kittens have eaten, Maria is telling them a story about the Cardinal Mezzaluna who’s sends the cats food.

In the memorable short story Cat Person (2017), Kristen Roupenian inverts the cat lady trope by giving her male protagonist, Robert, a couple of pet cats. She employs the presence of Robert’s felines as a symbol that Margot uses to construct her image of him. “We decide that it means something that a person likes cats instead of dogs,” said Roupenian in an interview. But there is something sinister going on. Margot never sees the cats, and wonders if Robert has lied about them. So what is it about pretending to have cats that might endear Margot to him in a sexual setting? Is he using his cats to lure her in? I've never been one for poetry, but since blogging I've been asked to review a few books that are either poetry books or tell their stories in poetry form. This is a genre that is growing on me and I am becoming to love.

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A modern day folktale comes to life in this narrative poem of 125 tightly metered rhyming couplets ending with a message.

Mezzaluna briefly describes his love with Anne-Marie as, “For though the love we felt ran deep, I had made other vows to keep, which made our love a grievous wrong.” Their relationship felt almost forbidden. There is a sense of priority and love in the form of sacrifice and holding vows. Fresh, funny and for anyone who’s ever felt astray, CAT LADY will help you belong – because a woman always lands on her feet. Mary M. Schmidt was a student in Rome during the ’60s and came to know the many feral cat colonies. She is the author of poetry, prose, and was a member of Poets Against the Iraq War. She resides outside Washington DC with her cat Graycie. By the request from the Mezzaluna, he asks Maria to help him with his dying wish. There was a lady named Anne-Marie that Mezzaluna was in love with. He wished to know if she remembered him after many decades apart. He believed that Maria would be able to find her.But perhaps the moment the crazy cat lady motif truly jumped the shark was with the song Buttload of Cats on an episode of the television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend earlier this year. Rebecca Bunch walks herself down to the Lonely Lady Cat Store. “The smell is overwhelming inside / This is the future smell of my house / It’s the smell of my dreams that have died,” she sings. “When you’re a permanent bachelorette / It’s mandatory that you go out and get / A buttload of cats / Oh, yeah!” The inception of the “crazy” moniker is harder to pin down, but its connotations of hysteria are an old gender stereotype. Added to this, the extreme end of the modern “crazy cat lady” stereotype has more than a few cats, which is unusual. Eleanor Abernathy, for example, has cats dripping off her: she is, essentially, portrayed as a mentally ill, alcoholic, compulsive hoarder. I don't read huge amounts of poetry these days but if I do I like it to really be memorable and special. Cat Lady most certainly was. For starters how could I not read a book with this title? But apart from that I was really glad that I did. This is a special little book of beautiful words.