"Saint Of" is an Unholy Feast: a review by Jezmina Von Thiele

Saint Of by Lisa Marie Basile is a sultry dance with longing--the dance is fast then slow, hot and sticky, choked on neroli and incense, and at times, blessed by a Mediterranean breeze, cool marble. Basile’s

images make you want to step into the page and live there. Lack begets want, and want begets

lack, and the book feels like a holy meditation on the unholy reality of a society that does not

look out for its own, even though the earth is lush, a constant tension throughout themes of

poverty, abuse, neglect, and abandonment. In this collection, summer is the only season,

encapsulated by blooming marigolds and souring champagne. Ripeness and rot are inextricably

linked, and the speaker sees this in herself too, asking, “What if I’m bad but not sorry?” in “saint

of summer sorrows.” She is not bad, though. She has had to improvise.

The collection starts at the beginning, with an epitaph from Genesis, and then the first poem,

“saint of origin,” but that origin is “a conclave of losses.” So much of this book feels like

balancing an equation, but instead of numbers there are violet skies in summer, women’s

shelters, squalor, roses, all tallied up, compared, multiplied, divided, until you see that they are

endlessly found within each other like a literary fractal. The lines, “My people crossed seas/ to

sleep on benches. My people of lemon trees/ and endless chasm,” from the poem “saint of

poverty” sunk in me for some time. So many of us come from a lineage of migration, big or

small, of searching and not finding enough. When Basile writes in this same poem, “Me, I am

made of want, and my want is want,” the reader is presented with the spiritual axiom of the

collection. Or perhaps she puts it even more succinctly with the compound, “ruin-want.”

The conceit of Saint Of is tight. Those who pray to saints are asking for something, and the

speaker of these poems has either become the saint of so many things, or knows them so

intimately. She has wanted herself into a state of holiness, but the speaker’s holiness is not a

holier than thou. It’s through the looking glass of holy. She explains in “saint of abandon,” that “I

interpret god as an invitation for sin.” The gift of wanting is to be able to imagine something

better, and receive with rapaciousness every moment of beauty and pleasure available.

Travel has an interesting arc in this book, the speaker tracing her origin is loss, in the hardships

she faced with her family in the US, and as the speaker follows her want, she returns to Italy

and Sicily, the origin of her family. These places are not elevated as the answer-- she is still

searching and wanting in the streets, but her mobility and new relative freedom shifts her tone

with poems like “saint of salvage” and “saint of reclamation.” She sees new angles of her life,

she gives herself as much as she can, and while she is feverish, and unsated, “...desire is my

prayer.”

Ultimately, a collection rooted in want and hunger gives the reader a feast. Basile’s

characteristic lush and textured language shines in a collection in which poetic form mirrors

poetic theme in a satisfying way. Read Saint Of and let the eternal summer drag you under--

delicious and dark.

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To buy Saint Of by Lisa Marie Basile, please visit White Stag Publishing or Asterism Books.

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Jezmina Von Thiele (they/she) is a poet, writer, educator, podcaster, performer, and fortune teller. Their work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review Online, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere, sometimes under the name Jessica Reidy. They are the co-author, with Paulina Stevens, of Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling, and co-host of Romanistan, a podcast celebrating Romani culture. They perform with The Poetry Brothel, Boston’s immersive literary cabaret. Jezmina reads tarot, palms, and tea leaves in their mixed Sinti Romani tradition, and teaches workshops on divination, spiritual wellness, and the creative arts in person and online in the New Hampshire seacoast.