Reviewed by Dustin Pickering
saint of
by Lisa Marie Basile
White Stag Publishing
Feb 2025, 75 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8990872455
Lisa Marie Basile’s poetry hinges on the secrecy of the mind, often in its hidden eroticism and darker complexities. In a 2020 interview with Rebecca Hiscott at The Creative Independent, Basile tells the interviewer about her choice in writing later in the day, “You become a little less human and worker-bee, and you become a vessel for the information to pour into you.” Basile’s poems have darker shades than a lot of contemporary verse and her subjects are intimate. Her advocacy for well-being and foster children meet in her poems alongside her obsession with magic and ritual.
Her latest collection from White Stag Publishing is saint of. The cover art reflects a devotional aura, an almost Catholic aesthetic. Each poem begins with the title, christening the thematic voice with religious impact. The opening poem is “saint of origin”, a prose poem with the telling line, “I feel the hurt coming before it hurts me. I carry the void as souvenir.” By introducing the collection with this urgency of anticipation in pain, the reader can expect deep longing and trials of abandonment in the remaining verses. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva defines the abject as “[…] simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the ‘I’ does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.” Kristeva’s conceptualization offers a lens in which to view the tensions within Basile’s poetry. The conflict between abandonment and the erotic impulse provides ample language for these Plathic devotions. In “saint of erasure” she writes, “It is a dialect I speak, tucking myself into small dark places, picking up the rotary phone and dialing, Hello, mother? Can you hear me?” The tensions of seeking comfort yet prying into one’s own distant recesses reflect on seeking resolutions from past grievances. This psychological underpinning flows into the next poem “saint of unbelonging” where tensions thrive in lines such as “I remember I was more than a girl, I was a radiance” and later lines, “By July I became a dark mass; a vanishing.” An early line, “To have a mother is to know your beginning” offers grief in this missing structure of the past. The “vanishing” is receding into one’s dark mystery, the reflections of what could have been for a person had she experienced fulfillment as a protected child.
In her 1977 essay “Stabat mater” Kristeva explores the alignment of the mother archetype with language and absence, “A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language — and it has always been so.” Basile’s poem “saint of poverty” explores this futility between psychological wholeness and perpetual mourning for the Self:
[…] I was born into the lack.
There are hungers in the make of me.
My people crossed seas
to sleep on benches. My people of lemon trees
And endless chasm.
Of forsaken. Squalor like a dear friend
The “lack” is a signifier for absence, and the “hungers” are tensions between longing for human justice and the rootlessness experiencing as one searches for the ancestral past. Phrases like “endless chasm” and “forsaken” to describe one’s intimate “people” reflect Basile’s sympathies for the lost and hopeless encounters with desperation. She writes in this same poem, “I extract the dark mass / and send to it as a child; that is, I name it.” The void becomes the mother. The description of this void as a “dark mass” defines it in materialist terms even as the overarching language of the book is a reflection on sacredness.
“saint of orphaned girls” highlights Basile’s sympathies with complex personal imagery.
Let me stay my mother’s daughter—
abject, violenced, shaped of longing.
A later line:
I give the wound a name, and it feeds me.
The act of naming the “wound” makes it meaningful and an object, granting control to the wounded. The earlier lines define motherhood in relation to “longing”, an instance that the relationship instills tenderness and vulnerability. In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, psychoanalyst Karen Horney writes, “Basic anxiety can be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted or endangered in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, humiliate, betray, envy […]. And special in this is the child’s feeling that the parents’ love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity […] may be only a pretense.” Basile’s lines capture this feeling of motherlessness within the complex desire for motherhood; by naming the void in herself derived from maternal absence, Basile’s instinct to name imagines her void as the infant she nurtures. This void is not nurtured in the sense of caretaking for growth. Rather, the nurturing is to protect oneself from the void’s powerful sinister forces. Horney also notes in the same book that conflict is normal and not neurotic, so Basile’s defenses through language cultivation offer a pure instinct for survival. Other poems offer sentiments of comfort such as “saint of women’s shelters”, implying that Basile’s sympathies are not narcissistic wounds bleeding eternally, but real and actual feelings extending to others like herself.
“saint of uprooting” furthers develops the theme of incompleteness and ambiguity:
In this world they make me scarlet.
Ask me my full name and how to pronounce it
or they barely say it at all,
making me a half-thing,
a ration of myself, an almost.
The feeling of being misunderstood is defined in these lines. The “world” Basile describes is the one in which she suffers alienation, and this alienation undergoes an almost erotic nature as she is made “scarlet.” The lines both reflect a surreal world of constant male attention and one in which this attention might replace the unknown mother in spite of its dehumanizing aspects. “Let me not exist between uncertainties,” follows these lines in the next stanza. The tone is like the “Our Father” yet it decries ambiguity, demands reconciliation with one’s whole self. The perpetual strife between disparate modes of being, abandonment and wholeness, tear the poet in two like Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar. Psychological struggles often have enough strength and motility to intone cosmic dimensions. The essence of language in saint of is a recursion into sacred impulses through threading of the personal into the cosmic. This impulse is described in Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr by Jean Paul Sartre as he defines his atheist impulse toward psychological voids, “He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god’s secret virtues.” Without god, psychological voids shape our definitions of virtue and justice. These traditionally divine conceptualizations connect the vulnerable human to her sacred resolutions through integration of the subconscious yin and yang, permitting wholeness. Jung’s concept of integration unifies the individual Self to the cosmic realm. In responding to the Navajo myth that humans help the god of the sun cross over the earth, Jung responded, “I had envied the fullness of meaning in that belief and had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation, that in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world….” This reflects his concept that we are co-creators of being with God, and our world is not determined by divine order. This balancing act between determinism and free will is a frequent tension in great literature; in particular, I am reminded of the tragedies facing Aeneas on his journey to found Rome. Often a hero burns bridges, suffers peril, and languishes in primordial depths to create beauty. Aeneas himself remarked on this tension, “If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.” Clearly creative work, especially if it is fresh and distilled, is an unsettling task. Sacred impulses visit the poet, yet often God is absent and our cries for wholeness go unheard. This extraordinary human experience animates the tensions a poet utilizes to recreate her experiences into language. Rather than the Romantic “emotions recollected in tranquility” proposed by Wordsworth, Basile’s contemporary voice shapes a maternal archetype from God’s absence.
This absence is not so much an actual metaphysical absence, but the poet’s restless search for existential answers to fill the emptiness of dread. This dread is left for the poet to constitute her own understanding of seeking wholeness rather than rely on the Godhead to inspire. Basile’s poetry in saint of is intoned with tenderness and incompleteness as she quarrels with her world. As a poet, Basile’s transformation of personal pain into liberty of the field of language restores her independence as both a female in a world of the male gaze, and a child searching for the maternal love lost in the past. The impulses derived from her longing conscript an ontology of desire in lines like “[…] when the hunt found me it was still hungry” (“saint of sepulture”) and “What girl can know the abyss / without becoming it?” (“saint of the before times”) In the same poem, Basile also invites metaphysical unveiling:
The promise of revelation is a body is a chapel is a return to somewhere home-shaped.
Her restless searching through the drawers of the past is like the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The Catechism in describing the sacrament cites Jesus’s own words to Simon Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” These words imply sin as a breach from community as well as an offense against God for which the sacrament atones, “Thus the sinner is healed and re-established in ecclesial communion.” However, can one forgive oneself in manner of the same sacrament as restless seeking defines the pursuit deeper and deeper? In defining this agonizing void from a maternal wound, poetry acts as ritualistic therapy. Freud also offered perspective on language as a medium to heal oneself in The Function of the Speech Act, “The function of speech brings material in the ego into a firm connection with the residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions.” Tensions between the dark unknown and visitations from this unconscious through poetic expression find symbolic import in Basile’s cathedral structure of memory. In “saint of ecstasy” she writes, “I am the wood warping in the heat, / snatching the lid off the sanguine / and letting it out at night.” This introduces the cathedral discreetly as the door into it, suggesting an opening into memory as Basile’s journey into the sacred begins. The sacred implies the structure of “want” as in her lines, “There is only the want, / and you cannot have it.” The temptation is defied by its own terms because desire is eternally insatiable; as a human being, we are always wanting something more than we have. Basile writes in “saint of voluptuary”:
I petition the language
of my cellular godbody.
I am so bound in ruin
that my prayer must take a form
or else it is just an absence.
Then toward the poem’s end Basile intimates, “The dark wrings out the diorama of my life.” The dark becomes sacred in itself, and the void is transmuted into meaning and desire. Desire, for Basile’s poem, is the actualization of being. The object stands in for the unanswerable abyss, bridging sacred and worldly impulses.
In “saint of tenebrous things” the opening lines return to the concept of wholeness:
In which a small dark aspect of self breaks off
and becomes the whole, subsumes it.
In which summer itself swallows the light
and is named Darkness.
Like a body of water that bulges and recedes, Basile’s psychological wholeness moves in and out of consciousness as Selfhood is threatened by revelation and then restored as language bends into definition of the conflict. She writes in the same poem, That a Tower could fall within me.” The Tower in the Tarot deck signifies upheaval and shaking of foundations. The introduction of this symbol invites psychological instability that resolves into new realities. The poems of saint of are a journey through consciousness from the dark depths behind it as the poet explores archetypes that define her most sacred symbolisms. In “saint of reverie” Basile writes, “We speak what-if, / dictated through dialects of desire.” Desire is not to be mistaken for sexual impulses, but the constant pulse of life through the human body as it searches for objects to define its purpose. Basile writes in “saint of abandon”, “The impulse lives latent within me. / Something like rain.” Desire is not always active but its expression is sudden and expresses itself in torrents. Basile explores this deeper in later lines:
At least without light you have purpose. Without light you are always in a state of seeking- or is darkness light waiting to be born?
These lines reveal desire’s dialectic between poles of absence and presence. Once desire is fulfilled, its shape is relinquished and the psyche seeks something else. When she does not know what the sought object is, perhaps she is more aware of “purpose” but what might this purpose be? We often dwell in abstractions to define meaning, ignoring the world before us as we intellectualize our environment. Is Basile perhaps intoning that action is more important in defining this restless seeking than contemplation? Is the cathedral she symbolically constructs her own mind? The Self wandering in and out of the wooden door as it bulges and recedes shapes the pulses within the act of poeticizing. In “saint of the immaculate” Basile shapes this psychoanalytic foundation further, “The repetitive life and its small teeth. / Is devotion to purity not erotic? / How the hunger holds through summer / and then lapses.” Basile suggests life emerges in distinct patterns. In defining “the repetitive life” as having “small teeth”, does she drift into infantile frailty? The “immaculate” is the newborn child, the void again resurfacing with “small teeth” to gnaw powerlessly at life’s heft. Eroticism is defined as tender impulses that resemble hunger the poet wants to hold completely, recognizing that its death is the death of desire. When desire dies, the mother has abandoned the child again.
“saint of the quiet endless burn” continues to define this restless waiting for answers, “I think of you unfolding into my life, / repeating / as the skin of the summer, opening / in the outside of my purity.” This poem is a reflection on meeting one’s soulmate, so Basile continues, “Two poets aching with the tender / spectre of the unrealized / but giving it different names.” Does she mean each poet names this experience differently or that the experience renames itself differently each time she reimagines it? She ends the poem,
What if that night split our lives in two,
and one of those lives is for me
and the other is for you.
It seems she explores how an experience might be intersubjective, bearing deep meaning for both poets yet the meaning is not exactly the same. This resonance of deep love between Beloved and Lover contains mystery and destiny wrapped in an encounter that satisfies invisible desires.
“saint of summer sorrows” explores the balancing act between Self and wholeness:
I think nonstop of the fissure but nothing
of what it could contain.
The space signifies the fissure itself as Basile ruminates on the meaning of desire rather than its sources. The “fissure” is the wound that channels desire, and whatever might fill the wound is the bringer of wholeness. By allowing the object to remain mysterious, Basile willfully hides her destiny from herself whereas it can unveil itself to her surprise. Through the poems, she revisits what she already knows and it is therefore transparent. However, she is exploring it abstractly through memory to clarify what might be distilled from it. As she writes in “saint of poetry”, “If I am to suffer, let me be beautiful.” Her sorrows are resourced into poetic lines as if to constitute the experiences into their own festival like the concluding lines, “Such bacchanalia.”
She further separates herself from pointless ruminations in the prose poem “saint of narcissism”. She writes, “That I extracted suffering like a shell without an ocean to echo, stuffing the void with more void, filling myself of the vicarious, filling until swollen of the dark triad, his blood begetting my own, until the only witnesses were me and the headlights, until it was erotic, this feasting, this thievery, this digging for a message, this only knowing pain by the name I give it, the very pleasure of the precipice.” This long line explores Basile’s haunted need for an answer to her complex suffering. There is an underlying sense that guilt for her experiences is part of her need to define it separately from herself. Using poetry, Basile exorcises the demon of narcissism to remind herself this pain is not penalty or her own desiring. She is not a voyeur in her own imagination and this pain has no resolution or answer that could satisfy her request. As darkness fills in a way that silences desire, pain becomes apparent because there is no object to receive it or embody its mercy. The “vicarious” for the poet is her impulse to create throughout the travail she cannot define, and due to its mystery her longings seem irresolute. In “saint of sea change” she casts this doubt in religious terms, “[…] I would become patron saint / of my own sorrows.” Here, the feeling of abandonment is tied with the poet’s independence. This resonates with Sartre’s own testimony, “We are damned to be free.”
An earlier line of the poem defines the unconscious and its pleas, “I have visions of ancestral symmetry, arabesque / and honey, tesserae of a thousand lives.” These visions offer Basile a foundation to secure her pursuits. A search into the past is not complete without digging into the ones who came before you. Basile sees this past as her own face, the “tesserae of a thousand lives” bred into her form as she explores her genetic suffering, “That we haven’t all been so sick, so dead at sea / in cathedrals where we kneel to devils / because our hearts haven’t been made whole.” Her sublimation of illness reminds us of the sentiments of Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill, “Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.” The cathedral is the place where her reflections meet the ghost haunting her questions: the ancestors who experienced the same pains and survived. Basile further gravitates toward her insistence on writing the sacred, “I am opening wounds that have never seen the light.” Poetry is not only healing but it is also resolution, healing’s twin. The “sea change” offered by the poem is a shift in perspective that defines the aching voices from the past.
However, Basile returns to the feeling of guilt haunting her pain in “saint of gluttony”, “We must ask for our afflictions, work for them.” The lines bear an angry defiance as well as if to suggest the haunting of pain is not at all self-inflicted, yet its insistence of pointing its finger is overbearing and requires rejection of guilt. To “work for them” Basile must be in some sense these afflictions are earned, and Catholic guilt restores dignity to them. “Gluttony” implies sin on account of the sufferer who feels in some sense responsible for the pain. In “saint of grief” the poet’s independence revisits:
I know heaven only in glimpses.
I call these glimpses prophecy.
I call grief my nightwound;
it evades my holiness, that I break for death
and hurl myself at its throat,
that I think I am separate
from the great golden womb.
The insistence on separateness and defying death is also rebellion against life’s unquenchable destruction on the human body and soul. The religious language evoked connects the sacred and profane through language. Basile also reconciles herself with destiny by intimating that she indeed is not separate from “the great golden womb.” She defines the link between sacred and profane in the same poem:
We call it divination as though the mystery is separate from the body.
In “saint of salvage” Basile returns to restoration as a theme. “Incredulous, divine; this ruin—the mother of wholeness.” She suggests in these lines that one must be broken in order to be reclaimed. Intuiting that “the mother” is an image of wholeness amongst her imagery of abandonment, pain, and devotion, Basile also defies these things as being sensible at all. “Incredulous, divine” suggests the poet’s acceptance of fate is ambiguous. She is unwilling to accept the “ruins” as inevitable or see it as defeat.
In “saint of undeserving girls” Basile returns to her theme of abandonment and guilt. The poem opens with the “pew at St. Andrew in The Fields” which invites ruminations of “a meadow of yesterdays”. These moments of the past she confines to “the crypt” in the same way she defines “the city as a crypt”. Her identity within the guilt and its suffocating ambiguity resigns her to write, “I am a crypt for myself.” Returning to the image of separateness from heaven, Basile questions, “[…] or am I the dream / out of body?” Again, the feeling of alienation through pain invites a need to escape the body. Basile then casts her prayers,
[…] kneeling in an unfettered divinity
an opening inside me
that widens
to hold
to be held
She becomes the mother of desire as she resolves to also be the infant she wants to carry. This is metaphor for self-love even in one’s most painful experiences. In “saint of reclamation” Basile certainly recognizes that her experiences are reconstructing her, “If I must dismantle my softness to save myself, so be it.” Later, “I will not violate myself for a god, who is just a bureaucrat, who is only a man.” These lines are reminiscent of Plath’s “Daddy” as she defies her father-image as overbearing, even resembling a Nazi or voyeuristic power. By defining this “god” as a “bureaucrat”, Basile reclaims these experiences as her own since she is the sufferer and not any god. There is also a tacit defiance in the line that this “god” does not resemble her, but is instead “only a man.”
One reading these poems may wonder what led the poet down such dark alleys? In the “Gratitude” section, Lisa Marie Basile explains the various sufferings she underwent during the years of writing these poems. She thanks the readers and supporters of her work. Aside from suffering devastation of home, illness, and severe bodily injury Basile continued to write and explore her craft. The poems are acts of resistance against the tyranny of pain and self-inflicted guilt. By sublimating her treacherous moments in language of ritual and metaphor, Basile restores her balance and defines the life she deserves as psychic trauma is expunged. saint of uses personal devastation to reach out to readers as a confessional. The beauty and charm of these poems of grief is that the grief does not sit. It reclaims its space for itself as well offers consolation for others who are abandoned and need strength in a voice from outside themselves.
About the reviewer: Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and books including Salt and Sorrow. He placed in the top 100 for the erbacce prize in 2021 and 2023, and was a finalist in Adelaide Literary Journal’s first short fiction contest. He was longlisted for the Rahim Karim World Prize in 2022 and given the honor of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace that same year. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube and co-founded World Inkers Printing and Publishing.