"I Would Be Mosaic: A Review of Lisa Marie Basile's SAINT OF" by Madeline Miller

Lisa Marie Basile’s saint of (White Stag Publishing, 2025) is a collection of 48 poems, “written after a spell of literary near-nothingness during which life’s goodness and darkness became priorities,” according to the author’s notes. The pandemic, autoimmunity, a broken back, a house fire, a wedding, and traveling were crises and experiences that ultimately did not prevent her writing, but rather inspired it.
As a New-York-City-based author, poet, and journalist, Basile is the author of such work as Nympholepsy (finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal, Andalucia, Light Magic for Dark Times, and more. She is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. Her work can also be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Tinderbox Poetry, Clash Books, and Spork Press. Additionally, Basile’s work has been included in anthologies like 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). MORIA had the pleasure of publishing a few of what would become saint of pieces in Issue 14 (Fall 2024), namely “saint of salvage,” “saint of avowal,” and “saint of sudden death.”
Publisher White Stag describes Basile’s new book as “a gilded exploration of hunger — the hunger for the erotic, the ancestral, the forbidden, divinity, and hope.” Her themes in saint of include sexuality, the feminine, trauma, and grief — and the question of whether change is possible and how to get there. As her website comments, these poems are a proclamation of self as well as an invocation of saints. For example, in the poem “saint of sepulture,” the lines showcase time and how it goes too fast, while also emphasizing the feeling of wanting or wishing to go back: “The summer was always waiting, a waiting, // a wait, // wait, // wait.” These lines show her feelings of being stuck in the past and being filled with regret, and their excess spacing literally slows the reading process down, making the reader physically wait on the next word. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker self-corrects, more than once: “It could have been daylight. It should have been daylight. It could have been.” This line dwells in the conditional tense, which is, by definition, uncommitted — but it also flip-flops — ”could have/should have/could have” — intensifying the nature of the “what if.”
In the poem “saint of figments,” there is a yearning for wholeness, completion. The speaker wishes she was “un-dented,” a metaphor meaning she wishes she wasn't broken. This longing speaks to the vulnerability we as humans often carry yet wish to overcome. In “saint of firation,” the phrase “Let me see the spectrum” conveys the idea of seeing things from various angles, extending desire from one's own power into the domain of empathy and comprehension. “Stand in a field of every color,” alludes to a deeper yearning to understand life's complexity in its entirety, not just in black and white, but "the spectrum." The poem's last line, "I would be mosaic," suggests that accepting life's various facets and viewpoints would result in a lovely, complex whole.
Lastly in the poem “saint of sict fathers,” there is a strong emotional need for an emotional reckoning and a sense of remorse. The poetic imagery illustrates how tragedy and tradition can have a profound impact on a person's spirit, and the speaker's relationship with faith and family is intertwined with shame and longing: "These pews that have held my entire bloodline," the text reads. The phrase, "I ask, the devil that I am, for god," highlights the weight of faith that runs through families over the longterm. She acknowledges her own complicated sense of self by identifying with the “devil” even as she petitions god. This is a shattered sense of self, hovering between sin and salvation. The poem’s eerie final line — "The angels croak in my throat as they try to escape" — implies that purity and goodness has become imprisoned inside the speaker and wants to get away — and they die in her “throat,” as if her voice is what’s being compromised. These lines together depict a painful metamorphosis in which the desire "to spend the rest of my days being good" becomes entangled in silence and anguish. She is pleading for the opportunity to recover something conventionally “holy” from a life filled with grief.

Madeline miller

From New Jersey, Madeline is a second-year INDS major, who is merging filmmaking and interior design. Ultimately, she hopes to get into production design, but also has a deep love for screenwriting.. She served as MORIA’s Production Editor for Issue 15.