APOCRYPHAL

by Lisa Marie Basile

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 (self)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 (The Poetry Society of NY) and triste (Dancing Girl Press). 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.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2014

About the author

Lisa Marie Basile is an author, poet, and journalist based in Jersey City, NJ and NYC. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School in New York City.

She is the author of a few books of poetry, including SAINT OF (White Stag Publishing, 2025), Nympholespy (Inside the Castle, 2019—which was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014), and Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York, 2012). She’s also written a few non-fiction books, including Light Magic for Dark Times and others. She is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine.

Her essays, interviews, poetry, and other works can be found in The New York Times, Catapult, Narratively, Bust, Entropy, Best American Poetry, and more. Portions of her work were also selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions (selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler) and Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (selected by Carmen Maria Machado and Joyelle McSweeney).

Lisa Marie has presented her work at many literary series, including the Annual NYC Poetry Festival, NYC Writers Circle, Memoir Mondays, the Cornelia Street Reading Series, Weird Girls, Must Love Memoir, Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, McNally Jackson, and the KGB Reading Series, among many others. She has also led workshops or spoken in panel discussions at/for Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, and more.

Reviews

[Gwen Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe like hitting puberty again, this collection knocks out your two front teeth and leaves you scrambling in sand. Apocryphal frames a Madonna realizing her womanhood, budding with grief. It's an identity piece. It works in a number of ways toward that end interlacing family and age and sexual discovery and relationships.

Lisa juxtaposes the crispness of youth with moth-eaten maturity, yet somehow makes you ache for both. While parts of this collection feel like the aged photos of families in Italian restaurants, her language jerks us into the speaker's immediate consuming and being consumed: "so beautiful that my hair unbraids itself, unraveling / as stray pearls on the nightstand / which roll eventually / to land in your lap / & look up at you as a girl gagging on cock."

"I look pretty but feel so / young, standing on the curb sucking on the lemon of the sun." Apocryphal is musky, a stranger whispering a secret in your ear.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was like being under the most terrifying and seductive spell. I loved it.

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expertly crafted poetry throughout. Seemed mature and knowledgable. I'd read it again.

[exorcismemily · Rating 5 out of 5]

"what they mean is I drink good wine / and cut people open."

Apocryphal was my introduction to Lisa Marie Basile, and I adore this book! This is a fantastic collection of poetry that is almost a coming-of-age book for bad girls (here's a quote from one of the poems - "this is a / portrait of bad girls"). It has Lana Del Rey-esque vibes, and it's exactly what I wanted. There's a lot of pain here, and I loved the boldness of this collection.

Apocryphal deals with some unsettling topics, especially ones related to parents. There were other relatable topics in this book like loneliness, grief, traveling, ennui, sex, death, and more - mostly from a female perspective. This book was comforting to me, and it's one of those books that makes me feel understood. My only complaint is that I wish the poems had titles. I'll definitely be reading more from Lisa Marie Basile, and I highly recommend picking up this book if you get a chance.

[Janae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Undoubtedly, Lisa Marie Basile’s collection, Apocryphal from Noctuary Press, can only be read as one who savors the crumbs of a last meal. Her poetry evokes hunger for every last vision—to gorge on every narrative snapshot with a runny chin and wagging tongue.

Read my full review for The Boiler Journal here.

[Lynsey G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Apocryphal" is darkly beautiful, gorgeously brutal, and unflinchingly honest in a way that continues to deliver gut punches and slightly uncomfortable arousal throughout. The speaker never drifts or dances or flirts—she kicks and bites and bloodies her way through frank and haunting discussions of what it is to be human, to be a woman, to be filled to the brim with every emotion under the sun and to delight in the macabre dance of expressing every one of them.