Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. "'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"
