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Index Previous Next 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit The Rescue People use the word 'closure.' It's not about closure, it's more about justice. ― John Walsh, father to Adam Walsh. Today in the news: Miraculous Rescue An uncle drags a shark to shore to save his near-dead nephew. A bull of a shark, the arm that it tore from the boy when he waved for help fueled the beast's palate; its tail in the uncle's grip, a blur of blood claret and kelp; the husks from his palms, a grim and edible kale. I want a shark that I can wrestle and make it spit you out. To make it yearn for its strength, to thrash about as I nestle its nose in my grip. I want to turn you loose from a palpable place: a well, a shed, a jaw. I want the monster to face me and beg for the law. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008.

Index Previous Next A Glass of Absinthe After Degas At first we pass them, unstudied as a snapshot where marginal subjects have slipped in. A disenchanted pair off-center and off-level, lean like bags of flour into the singular pitch of a cafe's genial keel; no ballast here except for the pool of milky licorice - a teetering glass of absinthe. So startling to see how everything was made to dovetail; how the zigzag of empty tables between us and the luckless couple traces a brooding loneliness, a composition so boldly calculated that we can hardly face its draughtsmanship. Powdered pigments molded into figures whose back sides blaze in mirrors propped behind them like butterflies caught in an ashen rain. The proprietor had thought the glass might brighten the place. But, there is no changing history or the reflections of our lives. . Upcoming in The Banyan Review, Fall 2023.

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BOOKS More Info Smiling at the Executioner Kelsay Books, November 2023 Smiling at the Executioner is a brilliant collection of poems inspired by the Stoic philosophy, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying these poems, which know how to live on their own, to take root in your heart. These are the kind of poems you hope you can remember to quote when in moments of uncertainty . McLatchey is not some one-trick theme artist who will sing you “I get knocked down, but I get up again”—NO!—she’s the one who will serve you images, sounds, and textures that make you want to read this book aloud. She will bring you the taste of bread, the promises of olives, the singing of hunger, and the love of desire. —J.P. Dancing Bear , editor of Verse Daily Order Order Video More Info Beginner's Mi nd From Shipyard to Harvard Yard: Embracing Endless Possibilities Winner of the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award "Would the bad children please raise their hands?" Discover why that statement and so many more will have you either smiling or crying as we examine the question, "How do we want teachers to teach, inspire, and guide our children?" Told through the eyes of a very observant ten-year-old, Beginner's Mind is the how-to book we have been waiting for – a book that describes teaching the way we so passionately want it for our children. For parents of young children, their teachers, homeschooling parents, teachers in training, and all adults interested in understanding the loving way that children can blossom in school while discovering their endless possibilities, this book is a must read. " Rippling with wisdom and creative genius. " Readers' Favorite 5-Stars "Read this book and re-open your mind." - Robert Fleck, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics & Astronomy "Anyone who has been influenced by a beloved teacher will savor this work; educators will especially appreciate it." - Library Journal A "fourth grade teacher that many readers will wish they’d had"! - Kirkus More Info Order The Lame God It is a hard fact that, to the artist, everything is material. We grit our teeth and use even the most personal catastrophes—our own and those of others—to make art. This is what the Classical authors did, and this is what M. B. McLatchey has done with her great subject in this book. The effect is powerful, and ultimately, The Lame God proves that if our traumatic experiences don’t destroy us, they can produce masterful works, in which human nature rises to its heights. — From the foreword by Edward Field, American poet and essayist, and judge for the 2013 May Swenson Award Winner of the 2013 May Swenson Award More Info Order Great Works of Ancient Greece From the Heroic to the Classical Age Against a backdrop of economic strife, political unrest and relentless war with neighboring regions, the ancient Greeks give the world philosophy – a preoccupation, as Socrates says, not with simply living, but with living well. As the readings in this text will demonstrate – from the ancient epics of the Warrior Age of heroes to the teachings of the great thinkers in the Golden Age of Athens – living well for the ancient Greeks will mean answering the same question again and again: “What should we call a good life?” For introductory-level students in the Humanities, as for the most accomplished scholars, this is a question for all of us. More Info Order Primary Sources G reat Works of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and Middle Ages As a supplement to the wide variety of textbooks that students use in their Humanities courses, this collection of primary sources exposes readers to the original voices of the past. Primary Sources is a compilation of the most representative works from the Ancient Period through the Middle Ages, with annotations and introductions throughout to assist the reader. Significant readings from the modern era are also included to encourage the student to examine connections between ancient and modern ideas as well as discover the larger social and political questions that have defined Western civilization. More Info Order Advantages of Believing The verses in this collection chronicle an earlier time in the author’s life as well as an earlier – and in some ways, foundational – poetic. A poetic, as E.E. Cummings suggests, that is more a way of seeing things than saying things. While the settings for the poems shift between continents – America, England, and France – the perspective, the way of seeing things, is undeniably that of the foreigner, the tourist, the disoriented – and yet somehow stewarded – young scholar. 2014 FLP Open Chapbook Prize Winner - Finishing Line Press

Index Previous Next Featured in Verse Daily - 2004 Against Elegies What if we let you sing first? What if we look for you with Mallarme’s blank stare: birds round an empty dish, stony limbs? To tell the history of our grief we settle for an empty doorway and a maple leaf or a woman with neckcurls, named Jane, changed by her poetry teacher’s love to a wren wound in light. Shimmering anodyne. Elegies so resolute in wood or wings that we forget the truer measurements of unfinished things: the distance between two disappearing habits; the echo of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat; the length of a dreamy boy swinging from his favorite limb; the ragged patch below — our ground for spotting him. If grieving is a way of working wood, building thresholds, wrapping birds — then hands will keep us tending things too near. What if this June air should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes with the passiveness of prayer? What if the breeze that would carry a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise? . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2004. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2004.

Index Previous Next 2012 Erskine J. Poetry Prize - Finalist Catharsis A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts since his doctor recommended more fruit. My head tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke – what Aristotle called a cleansing: the comedy channel in bed. A piecemeal purging meant to clear our minds, a chance to graft, like patchwork, the wreckage of our lives onto a campy figure, cheer for him; love him for dancing when the gods single him out, pile on their twisted trials. As if – for a few moments – we are watching someone else’s life unfold. Pizza and beer, you my armchair, tucked in our sheets. As if – for a few moments – we have climbed up from some well to lounge on sun-baked stone, take in the Dionysian Mysteries: lore of the vine – seasons, grapes, wine. Nothing ever truly dying. And us, tender initiates, laughing so hard we’re crying. . Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Finalist for the 11th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize . Published in the 2012 Spring issue of S martish Pace .

Index Previous Next 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit The Retrieval Here again. The way you used to wake us – rouse us with that impatient stare. A stubborn, boy-crazy, eighth-grader you make the same requests. We say them with you. Isn't this what happens when some of us bring water to the dead? This private shift to living only sometimes with the living. Eight months among the missing and you come padding back in your white socks and jeans; specter of grief we locked away before it made us more dry-mouthed and speechless than our counterparts in dreams. Grief like light encounters in a half-sleep: your moist face in a morning mirror. Are you in someone else's too? O, city of mirrors. And how, each night you casually resume at every threshold to every listing room that awkward lean -- the one you would do when you could not ask, but knew that we could help. Your bony shoulder barely touching the wall; your right foot crossing the other. So much the pose of one who is neither coming nor going. It's difficult to know why we should wake. Still, every day we rise like guardians ex officio, like gate-keepers to a city of passing shades -- each one a new acquaintance with your face. Each one a new petition for deliverance of the innocent and quaking. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008.

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Index Previous Next The Shadow Maker Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience. – Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth richest man in the world; a harvester of pearls: our small talk like algae-rich waters and tides –new births, divorces, prizes our children acquire – feeding and keeping the oysters alive. is a master of illusion: figures in captioned poses, screen and light; shadows that dance on cave walls. Dramas that make us muse, lean in, post notes like medieval glosses in the margins of someone else’s domestic scenes; illuminators to an epic chant, a rhapsody’s god-dream. is the Ideal Prince, accepting the burden of princedoms, glory, survival, to jettison distinctions: good and depraved; monarch and something human saved. Better to be loved and feared rather than admired, or worse, revered. A lord who understands the desire to acquire. A magician with two hands. is a Philosopher King, able to discourse on goodness, justice, corrupting pride; hold court on high ideas: opinion, false truths, reality– a theory of forms that casts our lives in cycles, fruit and fallow; sinners redeemed. A god’s will altered; a cave master’s dream. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sequestrum , Issue 32, June 2022.

Index Previous Next Balcony House Mesa Verde We huddle beneath a sandstone roof afraid of dream-like depths. All around: a cave metropolis. Two hundred homes piled story upon story, rise to a mezzanine of slick adobe tiles. Impregnable Balcony House. Its builders crossed a narrow ledge, then threaded a small entry that tests our king-size son and draws us to the same high wall the same sheer cliff that others slipped – or leaped from – seven hundred feet, seven centuries ago. They bartered goods, but had a taste for gambling. As here, a charming reconstruction: talus of tiny arrowheads, string of indigenous berries draped, with surprising grace, by an open pit. Exchanges we recognize: ritual gifts for the chance of a woman's forgiveness – and not – as our guide would have it – for the chance of crops. Seasonal beads for an earlier season's omissions. Shimmering talus, like the memory of a kiss. Plucked berries for a city whose heights must have made them light-headed, somehow unable to turn the earth back to life. A stirring pool of cold, clear water is all we hear today. Or perhaps, not water, but the buried tones of chanting priests in kivas underground. How could they not have heard the pools receding? How did they miss the cracking clay below? Perhaps it was our same habit of being: an ever-promising season – men trotting up toe-holds cut in stone to tend crops on a lush green mesa: a vigilance they must have thought unrivalled, while their babies swung from the ends of roof poles below, to a rhythm sung from above – quietly taking in the canyon’s toll on love. . Copyright © 2001 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Tampa Review , Fall 2023.

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My Teaching Philosophy In Celtic mythology there is a story of an innkeeper who promises his guests a wonderful night’s sleep if they will stay at his inn, and enjoy his magical bed. When his guests complain that his beds are too short or too long, he assures them that they will grow accustomed to these new accommodations, and he sends them back off to bed. As soon as his guests fall off to sleep, he sneaks into their rooms and—with the fantastic swiftness of many myths—he cuts off their legs or stretches them. “What better way to provide for the perfect fit for his guests?’ he thinks. When we teach the Humanities, we start with the “guest”—the student. As much as we want to show our students the “magic” and liberation, and the growth and self-discovery that the humanities can offer them, we must always remember that what they need from us is not the story of that joy—but the tools for finding it themselves . Rather than promise a good night's sleep—or a life of convictions and fulfillment—we are obligated to model it. We model for our students the passion, the responsibility, and the deliberateness with which we come to our own studies, and we make them colleagues in that journey. In making them colleagues, we learn about their particular interests and goals—and in turn, we become allies in showing them the degree to which their particular goals are part of a complex of other disciplines, other intellectual questions. In other words, we help them to see connections—connections, not just between intellectual questions and disciplines, but also between human beings and each human being’s individual journey. - M. B. McLatchey Copyright © 2009 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved.