APOCRYPHAL

4.7/5 ( ratings)

Lisa Marie Basile's first full-length collection of poetry is an almost-memoir-in-verse, detailing vice, sexuality and grief through luscious poetics. Set in a dreamy, retro seaside town, APOCRYPHAL is a holy, girly, neurotic text obsessed with its own secret world. APOCRYPHAL attempts at truth but is littered with false memories and untenable hopes.

PRAISE

Lisa Marie Basile is a romantic only in a world where romance encompasses the lilac roar of loss and a lush, ornate divination of grief. The roiling search for fathers and life beyond the grinding ether of some female reality sidles up to fluid contemplations on the body, desire and belief. In Apocryphal, a camera captures everything, and that camera aches and bleeds and beats the drums of time's non-linear passing. --Gina Abelkop

I was born with a registry for sadness. I am born to be a spectacle, proclaims the fiercely candid speaker of Apocryphal. In this collection, a woman desperately searches through a landscape littered with ambivalence; she peers at us through wreckage left by a god-like, demon-like father who towers over her past with his smell like pine, chest you could wrap around a boulder. This brave collection proudly wears its vulnerabilities in a transformative gesture towards strength, self-exploration, and desire. Basile resists easy labels of victim/abuser, masculine/ feminine, power/weakness, want/repulsion, in order to expose the intricate hidden passageways of sex and power that exist within us all. Her lines and visions carry a shaman like quality, echoing and haunting the reader's psyche long after the book is put down. I still have the speaker's cries trailing me through my days: pluck me. pluck me. pluck me. pluck me. --Anne Champion

This is the way we talk / about fathers, says the speaker in Lisa Marie Basile's Apocryphal, recreating a dark new mythology of family history and trauma, womanhood, and sexuality. As the title of Basile's book indicates, mystery and doubt are at the heart of the narrative from memories painted as unreliable to the stories we tell ourselves in the face of trauma to the ways we rebuild ourselves out of those shadowy spaces. Basile relies on vintage snapshot images and a smoky dreamlike setting to recreate and at times deny an identity grounded in a brutal past, a speaker who was born of the kind of love / that sneaks up on you, and who claims, I want to haunt your history / like you've haunted mine. --Mary Stone Dockery
About the Author

Lisa Marie Basile in a NYC-based poet. She is also the author of the chapbooks Andalucia and triste . She is the founding editor of Luna Luna, a diary of art, sex and culture, and helps curate a musicopoetics performance show, Diorama. She is the NY editor and a writing instructor for The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, an online and print literary and arts journal housed at The Johns Hopkins University M. A. in Writing Program. A graduate of The New School s MFA program, she has been named a top contemporary NYC poet to read by several publications.