Andalucia by Lisa Marie Basile
Andalucia by Lisa Marie Basile, graduate, the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. 
Poetry Society of New York, LLC, 2011
Through a series of intimately interwoven vignettes, Andalucia paints an engulfing dreamscape, at once lush and treacherous, pale and aflame. The speaker in these poems has fallen in love with some sort of colorless and exotic hell. Disturbed by her “bad girl” past, laden with guilt and abuse, she revels in the sea, in the arms of centaurs, inside of tear jars. Like an antique travel diary turned mythic, Andalucia illuminates the simultaneous feelings of elation, delusion, and fear that go along with letting oneself get lost in one’s own land.
“Drunk and dolorous, talkative and handsome, Lisa Marie Basile’s chapbook Andalucia is a perfect confection of decadence decorated with hounds and leopards. Sweet and old-fashioned like an exotic candy you can’t quite place, you will want to devour it. ‘You don’t need a sea to be happy / do you?’ No, you just need to read Andalucia by Lisa Marie Basile.” —Kathleen Rooney, author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion)