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Sky Island Journal - Reviews J ason Splichal and Jeff Sommerfeld, Founders and Co-Editors, Sky Island Journal Smiling at the Executioner, April 2020 Review Pushcar t Prize Nominee 2020 Best of the Net Nominee 2021 "Smiling at the Executioner " is the epitome of what we consider powerful poetry to be. The emotional and intellectual transport it provides is nothing short of astonishing. Vivid, palpable imagery saturates the perfect pacing of this svelte, knife-like piece. Your craft is elegant, tight, and overtly physical throughout; the ebb and flow of your restraint and revelation rewards us in ways that linger long after your poem has left our lips. Your ability to extend a metaphor tenderly and unflinchingly is a true gift. Like all great art, "Smiling at the Executioner" is a gift that keeps giving; we discover more about it, and ourselves, with every reading. Its voice spoke to us immediately, and we are beyond excited to share it with the world. Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal, November 2022 Review "Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal " spoke to us immediately. Intensely personal yet wildly accessible, it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This powerful, vulnerable, tapestry of human landscape is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such beautiful and unexpected ways... The elegance of your craft, and “Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal,” are two gifts that keep on giving; we discover more about them, and ourselves, with every reading. Pop Quiz, January 2024 Review "Pop Quiz " is vulnerable, tense, powerful, and so incredibly accurate; it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This piece—like so many of our favorite M.B. pieces—is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such personal, beautiful, and unexpected ways. Like all great art, “Pop Quiz” sticks its landing and is a gift that keeps on giving; we discover more about it, and ourselves, with every reading.

Index Previous Next NRR's 6th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist The Bath For a foster child The slightest wrong move could mean tidal waves. Certain disaster to a boy with everything resting on delicate tissue – a bruised knee to which you command a corps of plastic ships – an austere but (you promise) heavenly beach where men may lie down in soft sand, a tiny fold in your thigh; write letters and find oranges to eat; plan the next battle. Hard that you know so much about these distances from home. A trumpet blast! You steam your mission out. Predictably bad weather and still another perilous gorge of falls and fleshy islands. The search resumes for citrus or, at least, friendly harbor. I wish you both -- and not another tour of calculations tossed or unchartered, and not this shadowy map on water. . Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 6th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist. Published in Naugatuck River Review , November 2014.

M.B. McLatchey / Seamus Heaney Selected comments by Seamus Heaney about M.B. McLatchey: Character [M.B.] is highly intelligent, highly motivated, reticent, mature and humorous. I developed genuine admiration for the coherence, perseverance and intellectual distinction of her work [as a student]. - Seamus Heaney [1990] Academics Her gifts as a reader of Yeats [are] impressive… she impressed me by the breadth of her reading, the acuity and firmness of her critical intelligence and the sympathetic manner she exhibited. - Seamus Heaney [1990] [M.B. is] somebody with a sure and informed purchase on her subject. - Seamus Heaney [1995] Poetry I can see why awards come your way for your poems… [they] have a good confidence and coherence about them… they manage reticence and record nicely, and know what they’re doing technically. - Seamus Heaney [2012] Teaching She has an inwardness with the difficulties of writing… because of her good work as a poet. - Seamus Heaney [1990] As somebody who had written poems herself and who had worked with several distinguished American poets in workshop situations, her engagement with all the writers we discussed was eager and in earnest. - Seamus Heaney [1995] Note : M.B.'s keynote speech at the 2020 FSPA annual conference has been adapted into an Atlantic Center for the Arts video which celebrates M.B.'s time with Seamus.

Index Previous Next Girl at Piano Rings of blue smoke swirl above her head like kisses floating off a palm, or like balloons of varnished silk that stretch and lift her toward a parting draft. A mix of comic strip and something raw that worked in Lichtenstein's pastiche of lines and polka dots; yet, somehow, coming from her lips these figures make us shift and sip - and sip again. What is it makes us look away as if remembering things to do at home? Is it the clear distinction: what she sings and what she knows? That unexpected nimbus of true thought? Easier, no doubt, to look through little comic blocks, dream-like and Byzantine -- present, yet one remove from present scenes. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry , Fall/Winter 2006.

The Lame God: Book Review Review by Brad Crenshaw The End of the World A dear friend of mine from Holland has a son who, during his latency years, unexpectedly developed a seizure disorder. One evening years ago, after riding yet again in the ambulance to the hospital emergency room, his dazed son in his arms, he blurted out a Dutch proverb: “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” The context added particular weight to the emotional vision. I had come along afterward bringing extra clothing, mainly pajamas and underwear for the hospital stay, and at the moment it seemed possible to me that, given the proverb, no one in that family would be happy ever again. It was a sobering thought, and it put me on alert. I had children too, younger than my friend’s, but they had their vulnerabilities as well–they had desires, and the frustrations to desire. So I hunted around for things to do, clearing a path, smoothing the way toward their futures. My daughter discovered early on that she wanted to play the piano—not a violin, not a keyboard, but a piano. So,well, okay, that was easy enough: we found her a piano. I mean, seriously, I couldn’t even get the instrument out of the truck before she was all over it. My son, for his part, basically needed room, an exit from the strictures of developed social play into the boundlessness of an unconstructed world. From the beginning he has pulled me outdoors, enticed me out from behind my desk and onto frozen dog sleds, into kayaks floating among whales in the Pacific Ocean, on treks in arid Southwestern mountains photographing petroglyphs–and then he has gone to places where I could not follow, so that his safety did not depend on me, but on another father–this one Kenyan, who sat outside his cloth tent at night with a wooden club to whack any marauding hyena that came too close. The lions, apparently, were no problem. I have wanted to risk all this personal detail here in order to bring each of us, in our minds, personally, onto a certain pathway that leads in the end to M.B. McLatchey’s new book, The Lame God . It’s a book that pretty much requires a personal response from us, because the core of its themes centers around a person: 16-year-old Molly Bish. It is possible that some of you may have heard of her, insofar as her plight unfolded for months in the national news. In fact, it is entirely possible that a few of you may actually have known her, the real Molly Bish—maybe as a high school student, maybe as a neighbor— before in June, 2000, she was abducted from her lifeguard tower at Comins Pond in Warren, MA, and subsequently raped, tortured and then murdered. Whether McLatchey herself knew Molly is unclear: she does not disclose what, exactly, her relationship to Molly Bish and her family has been. But she does reveal that she has, at a minimum, spoken with the mother, Maggie Bish, to obtain permission to write explicitly about Molly, and about the attending horrors that ensued after she was found to be missing. McLatchey writes in her Introduction “This book is offered in memory of Molly Bish and in homage to her mother, Maggie Bish, who encouraged me to ‘keep talking about this; keep writing.’” McLatchey adds that “The story that this book tells is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent—the innocent have already seen the face of evil, smelled its breath, learned its customs.” This is a unique introduction to the poetry. We as readers are explicitly denied the usual aesthetic distances from the events depicted in the stories because the events are not fictionalized. McLatchey’s artistry here is working with brute facts—among which is the troubling recognition that the perpetrator, whoever he is, has not been apprehended. The man is still at large out there. Accordingly, there is no sense of justice in the book, no comfort derived from cosmic symmetries, no vengeance exacted, no eye taken for an eye, no recourse. Just horror. THE RAPE OF CHRYSSIPUS “She came home bone by bone. First her shin bone, then her skull. In the end, 26 of Molly’s bones came home to us.” –Mother of 16-year-old Molly Bish For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered. The gods saw what he took – a young boy’s chance to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings to Zeus, to win his wreath of wild celery leaves, advance the Greek way: piety, honor, and strength. He raided their heaven, not just a small boy’s frame. Their justice was what Laius came to dread: a son that would take his mother to bed, a champion of the gods, an Oedipus. We called on the same gods on your behalf, asked for their twisted best: disease like a Chimera to eat your Laius piece by piece; a Harpie, who might wrap her tongue around his neck and play his game of breathing and not-breathing that he made you play. Medusa’s curse in stone – and a Golden Ram to put you back together bone by bone. The quotation alone is hair-raising—though with that said, I am struck by the poet’s lack of overt drama in the poetry that follows. On the one hand we have the sensational, flat enumeration of the number of bones that were, over time, returned one-by one to the grieving mother—and with the manner of that return left unstated. How would you do it? Did they come in a box? Labeled with an evidence tag? Did a policeman ring the doorbell, and hand over her skull? What kind of protocol could even be possible here? However, before we step out into that emotional darkness, we hear the poet’s measured voice avoiding hysteria by invoking a classical myth, and with it organizing a parallel narrative of divine retribution to help her metabolize her raw feeling. Because contemporary explanations just feel petty, just lame excuses offering a simplistic cause-and-effect model to rationalize the behavior— something like ‘bad parenting creates bad boys’, or these days maybe it is a defective neuron causing the problem. Bullshit. It takes the scale of mythology to begin to convey the goliath male evil that descended upon Molly. The poet’s task is, essentially, to figure out how to express the full weight of the violation without screaming. It is a delicate matter. Often in the book McLatchey combines classical figures with traditional poetic forms to allow us perspective with which to view the scope of violence, and the depth of the insult to Molly and her family. In Little Fits, for instance, the poet composes a sequence of Petrarchan sonnets to organize her thoughts and feelings, and to secure a mental space in which to arrive at insight, emotional clarity, and decision. The formal restraints allow the emotional matter to be pitched very high, but without ever sounding bathetic. And look at the graceful formal movement in this sonnet: 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 catharsis: 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 the 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. Fortunately for the book—possibly for the poet herself—McLatchey moves from her contemplation of the brutish facts of murder, and toward a reprieve, toward a respite that acknowledges other continuities besides those of abiding anguish. Here we find an intimate pair coupled, which is to say, linked in their common association that, for the moment, includes humor and catharsis. Here we are offered an image of mutual purpose, and shared pleasures, as well as their doubled purgation expelling together the poisonous, unacceptable affects. The purgation signals an emotional transition out of trauma and into sorrow, and to a generalized sense of both vulnerability and promise. The transition is an essential point of the poet’s vision. She discloses that she, too, has children—two sons, we are told—and she has to wonder what she has let herself in for. Having children is a sort of biological vote for continuities, a tacit endorsement of future, continued participation in the social morass. Like it or not, she as a parent is compelled to be party to a world that has its disgusting matters, its truly fearful possibilities, against which she tries to civilize brute desires, and ward off threats to naked innocence. But there is only so much she can do. Always in the distance burnt brown combines sweeping up spools of wheat. My sons sleep in the back seat—the younger one bowed over; the other up straight like a sun-drenched sheaf. Up ahead, one sheer pool after another that the heat lays down. Day stars (the older one calls them) spring up from the pools and usher us on, then flicker and steam. A Dakota we’ve never seen… I reach back to wake the older one: solicitude, or a favoritism that I had thought might pass. Or a reckoning of our lives that comes when the light slants like this, as if we are looking through more than window glass. I pat his leg to comfort, or to bless him, or to brush some divination off. But he is already looking out…. from Joseph Dreams Two Dreams There is only so much any of us can do, and who knows if it is ever enough? POSTSCRIPT : It occurs to me that an interesting mirror image to McLatchey’s book —or at least to the events composing the detonating first cause of the book—is a poem found in Frank Bidart’s first poetry collection, Golden State . I’m thinking of Herbert White , which is the first of Bidart’s poetic attempts to inhabit the psyche of various historical persons—Vaslav Nijinsky, for example, the anorectic Ellen West—and convey through them his own matching torments. Herbert White is, or was, a convicted murderer, child molester, and necrophiliac. Bidart’s poem, with its monstrosity, can be read as a companion piece to McLatchey’s traumatic abhorrence. I have written about Herbert White elsewhere: http://www.bradcrenshaw.com/sin-body-frank-bidarts-human-bondage Brad Crenshaw April, 2014. The original article can be found at: http://bradcrenshaw.me/tag/m-b-mclatchey/

The Rape of Chryssipus 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize I chose "The Rape of Chryssipus" among a remarkable field of finalists for three reasons. The poem displays both wildness and restraint, and arranges the tension between these impulses through the clean elegance of its prosody. It makes me think of Yeats's ambition to write a poem "as cold and passionate as the dawn." The poem also displays great breadth, making us feel both the particularity and the universality of the brutal acts it recounts. And finally, "The Rape of Chryssipus" recalls one of poetry's prime functions: to curse. Appalled by the occasion of the poem, I'm entranced by its ambition to transcend accusation. "The Rape of Chryssipus" is no less than a spell, calling upon elusive powers to enter the human world. -- Dr. Philip Brady, Judge 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editor's Prize The judge, Dr. Philip Brady , is the author of three books of poems and a memoir. He has received fellowships from Ohio and New York, and residencies at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Fundacion Valparaiso, the Headlands Center, and Ragdale. He teaches at Youngstown State University, where he directs the Poetry Center and Etruscan Press. The Spoon River Poetry Review

Index Previous Next Ode for My Department Chair Who Left a Face Shield on My Desk For Sally Because all of this is seeing through complex prisms; seeds reconciling to stalks that lean grey-blue instead of the expected, upright green. Because the soil we trusted, turned, and patted on our knees became unresponsive, a sick child’s pale serene. Because birds and song became a dull-working machine. Because this exchange called teaching is more than granting access, pointing to open gates. Because Sophocles portrayed us as we ought to be; but Euripides portrayed us as we are: surprisingly unstayed and dying a happy death in front of them. Breath after breath. Because care in a time like this is not a stockpiling of perfect arguments, pleas and refrains as if part of a lesson plan – or worse, the cliché – something preordained . Because master and apprentice should look the same. Smithies hammering, melding, iron and steel. Because metals, once coupled with the right vistas and bent into shapes – a cruciform, time’s infinite wheel – were in a previous plague, thought to heal. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in NCTE's 2021 Fall issue of English Journal , National Council of Teachers of English

From the Heroic to the Classical Age Great Works of Ancient Greece by M. B. McLatchey 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. This collection of ancient writings is intended to expose students to the original voices of the past in “primary source” form. Unlike the historian who summarizes Aristotle’s “Ethics of Happiness”, the primary sources herein give us Aristotle himself – his exact words as they appeared when he etched them into papyrus in the 4th century BC. Because a reading proficiency in the ancient languages is not expected of undergraduate students in the Humanities, the ancient texts translated into English here have been carefully chosen by the author based on their affinity to the original text and their adherence to the true spirit of primary source translation. Available on Amazon Book Details: Paperback: 182 pages Publisher: CreateSpace; 3rd edition (May 26, 2020) Language: English ISBN-13: 978-1724212344 Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.4 x 10 inches Shipping Weight: 1 pound

Women's Health and Breast Cancer Care Awareness - 2024 Sponsored by Atlantic Center for the Arts and AdventHealth This article first appeared in Of Poets & Poetry , Nov/Dec 2024. Home

THE HAND AND THE WRITING

FROM MUTINY TO MUTINY

When speaking of the creative mind, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “There’s a phrase in Buddhism called ‘beginner’s mind’. It is wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.” The beginner’s mind is a way of looking at the world as embraced by one of the world's most creative giants ever known – Steve Jobs. As the author, M.B. McLatchey shares with us in classroom stories from her coveted childhood, beginner’s mind is a mind innocent of preconceptions and judgements; a mind that continues to face life mull of curiosity and wonder and amazement; a mind that invites creativity and sheds conformity. And, in a time when the education "experts" reward teachers for meeting standardized goals, Beginner’s Mind , the book, reminds us of what we already instinctually know about the need to nurture nonstandard lives. In Beginner’s Mind , we experience first hand the teaching we wish for our children – for all children. We see the beginner’s mind being nurtured and grown – day by day, page by page – and come to understand it’s warmth and beauty firsthand through the eyes of a 10-year-old and her classmates under the enlightened and loving mentorship of their fourth-grade teacher, Miss D. For America’s business leaders and CEO's, encouraged by flourishing STEM projects and government-funded programs in our public schools, Beginner’s Mind is a cautionary tale about what we may have forgotten and what our children may be missing, and it is about an enlightened teacher that led the battle – and proved the value – in educating the whole child: head, body, and soul. Beginner's Mind , Regal House Publishing, 2021.