Advantages of Believing

by M. B. McLatchey

2014 FLP Open Chapbook Prize Winner - Finishing Line Press

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

M. B. has a real sense of the exuberance and playfulness of language … .This is not to deny the essential seriousness of some of her poems, but to praise them first as poetry, as investigations in the medium.  
– Lawrence Raab, author of The History of Forgetting


Crafted and assembled several decades ago, 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. Whatever merit the poems present reflects the good guidance of the author’s former teacher and poet, Lawrence Raab. Published here for the first time as part of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition, these poems hold true to Yeats’ observation that a poet’s life is measured out, inevitably, in verses.
– M. B.


Cover art: Isis Olivier http://isisolivier.com