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The Lame God: Florida Book Review Reviewed by Marci Calabretta Because the adage is true that there are too many books and so little time, I've learned to devour poetry quickly. When I picked up M. B. McLatchey's debut collection of poetry, The Lame God , I expected to breeze through it as easily as any other book. But The Lame God is not like any other book. In fact, it is exactly the sort of book you can only read by pondering slowly. It is also a book that calls readers to action, even before the first poem begins. In the preface, McLatchey writes that roughly 2,000 children "are reported missing daily to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children." An opening epigraph next reads, "Acting quickly is critical. Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are ultimately murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction." In the first section, each poem resonates with the frustration of waiting helplessly for a child to return. The narrator in "1-800-THE-LOST" says, "I want her to discuss you in the present tense. // I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home." Each subsequent section delves deeper into the anguish of loss. First, McLatchey shows the frustration which evolves into real and righteous anger, demanding that the guilty "choke up my child like the Olympians— / a girl, unbruised by her journey down their // throats." Then comes the lashing-out and self-blame. "Apology" is a list poem of regrets that will break your heart: For—trusting your safe return-- not missing you. For trusting the gods. For my second-rate circumspection; for trusting the odds. [...] For teaching you not to shout. For us still uncovering your terror—layer by layer. For this sputtering sound of real prayer. Finally, comes the acceptance—not of absence, or of seeking justice, or even of grief itself. No, these poems finally settle into the acceptance of waiting for news of any kind—good or bad— because either way, these parents will be there when their children come home. "Do not worry, daughter. We are not leaving our watch / or showing our cards—just changing the guard." McLatchey is the poet standing at the gate, holding a torch to keep hope aflame even as the darkness descends. A graduate of Harvard University, Brown University, and Goddard College, McLatchey currently teaches writing and humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida. Well-versed in Classical mythology, she knows how to grit her teeth and tell the traumatic story in a way that will make people listen. She is the rare poet who looks fearlessly and closely at the terrible actions of which humans are capable, and who tenderly yet artfully tells the true stories of Adam Walsh, Amber Hagerman, Levi Frady, Maile Gilbert, Morgan Chauntel Nick, and Molly Bish, whose mother "encouraged [McLatchey] to 'keep talking about this; keep writing.'" When Edward Field chose The Lame God for the 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award, he wrote, "it takes courage to read this book...In exploring such a grief through the language of poetry, McLatchey makes things happen —she gives a voice to those too grief-stricken to speak, and she refuses to allow us to suffer in silence." This book is not for the faint-hearted, or for the "breezy reader." This book is for those 2,000 children daily reported missing, for their families, and for those moments when poetry alone can break through the grief. "But it is especially for the child who has not yet pried open a bolted door, borrowed a neighbor's phone, and announced to a 911 operator, 'I've been kidnapped and I've been missing...and I'm here.'" Marci Calabretta grew up in Ithaca, NY and is currently earning an MFA at FIU. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day, The Albion Review, and The MacGuffin. She is the co-founder and managing editor for Print Oriented Bastards and a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor. Marci Calabretta grew up in Ithaca, NY and is currently earning an MFA at FIU. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day, The Albion Review, and The MacGuffin. She is the co-founder and managing editor for Print Oriented Bastards and a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor. The original article by Marci Calabretta can be found at: http://www.floridabookreview.net/poetry.html

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Index Previous Next NRR's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Ode for an Absent Student So many dramas have played themselves out: a girl who saw through us, our Scout’s-honor truths; a girl scribbling her own proofs on the walls of a cell; a girl singing Fado in a tilted café, her star-rise a perfect – a textbook – chandelle; or, a girl whose shrill call feathers the walls of a well. Well of knowledge, coins, half-lives; mortar and water, a god’s paring knife. For his warrior mettle, Aristotle made Alexander recite – not the songs of Ajax – but the chant of his mother’s midwife. How she crooned at the sight of his scalp. Quick breaths, short beats like a cuckoo’s heart in flight; later, a conqueror’s lullaby; an air in clipped verse for his trek across the east, for his rise and fall, for the sound of his troops’ flat feet. Airs like anthems we hear in our sleep; bright conquests or the dull retreat. This morning marks three weeks. Your peers – all of us – proceed because there is a map to walk, countries to Hellenize – or not. Seas, you and Alexander must have known, cannot be crossed with brute force, missiles and stone. There is the compass that is another rower’s heartache for his home; the crow’s nest call that it will not be long. Things you forgot when you set out alone. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Published in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of Naugatuck River Review .

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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.

Award Winning Poetry - 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist At the Grieving Parents Meeting In the parish hall of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church, pictures of murdered children in our hands, we huddle in a sphere of folding chairs and a flickering fluorescent light. Some lean near the coffee and coffee cake that, each week, has the same floury smell of sympathy and each week, the same sour taste. By the tissues, a painted soapstone statuette – our patron saint. O, the watches and keys and gloves that appeared at your feet! A ruse that my mother relied on to make me believe that our smallest petitions are heard, that events, with the proper appeals, can be reversed, that almost anything lost can be retrieved. As a girl I chanted your name while I followed the trail: pockets, under the bed, under the sofa cushions, pockets again. Something's lost and can't be found. Please, St. Anthony, look around. When it didn’t turn up, I brought you coiled vines – like the petals I bring to my daughter’s room as if to stir up stale air – and the search would resume. Look at the priestess of talismans I have become: her saint card from First Communion in my purse; lodestones for paperweights at work. For good luck, a horseshoe-shaped necklace under my shirt: the crescent shape of the sacred moon goddess in Peru or the bow of the Blessed Mother’s cradling arm, arch like the threshold of her sacred vulva, twine like the helix of lovers. Look at the virtuoso that was finally birthed, who would use this ring of linked hands not for fellowship or grace, not to make my peace on earth, not to lay my gifts at your feet and give up the search, but to summon the face she petitioned and conjure a curse. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in River Styx 87, Spring 2012. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2011 Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize 1-800-THE-LOST The weight of the receiver in my hand: the down bird in my palm first lifting you. The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland. The shift in time, the shift to looking through her lens: today you are just one of two hundred lost. My eyes fix on our bright fence. I say your name, but you are no one new – caught in an ancient book that she’ll condense. I want her to discuss you in the present tense. I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home. We called you with our various loves, had hope, hovered over still fields; made wind like the gods do before they come unhinged, let their rage loose on an unresponsive yield. Fields gone deaf and dumb; unshaken, fruitless ground, unmoved by a neighborhood of mothers who left their own to find you – tables, like mine, set. I want the gods to swallow their prayers whole. Choke up my child like the Olympians – a girl, unbruised by her journey down their throats. I want her at my table: fruit, alms that the gods, I see, can give or take – balm for the irritations I caused, or they caused; gifts between us or perhaps among themselves – a girl that they’ll barter away. I’m here. And I’m willing to talk, or trade. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the American Poet Prize for 2011 Published in The American Poetry Journal , Spring 2012. Previous Next

Upcoming Events: April 2026 - Poetry Workshops - Atlantic Center for the Arts ACA will again be celebrating National Poetry Month by sponsoring a four-part series of poetry workshops hosted by M.B. every Wednesday in April next year from 4:15pm until 6pm. Signup Details Here . Previous Events: Oct. 24 - 26, 2025 - FSPA Fall Convention M.B. will be joining Sean Sexton and Brian Turner as speakers at the FSPA poetry convention next Fall in Lake Wales. The event will be held at Bok Tower Gardens . Details Here . March 26, 2025 - Poetry Reading M.B. will be guest reader at the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle event via Zoom. Open to all, the reading will be followed by an open mic. Details here. January 2025 - Poets for Peace Join M.B., local area poets, and musician Ray McNiece on Thursday January 23 at 7pm for Poetry & Music in Support of the Orphans in Ukraine . The event will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 56 North Halifax Drive, in Ormond Beach. Free admission; donations welcome. Contact Joe Cavanaugh, jcavanaugh1@gmail.com November 23, 1-2pm - Let's Talk Poetry! M.B. will host a creative writing discussion on Saturday afternoon during National Novel Writing Month at the New Smyrna Beach Regional Library, 1001 S. Dixie Fwy, NSB. Details here . November 6, 13, 20 - The HUB on Canal M.B. will host Florida Loves Poetry!! ™ workshops on three consecutive Wednesday afternoons this November (2024) at The HUB on Canal in New Smyrna Beach. Sign up here . October 2024 - FSPA Fall Conference The annual Florida State Poets Association Fall Conference will take place October 25 - 27, 2024 at the Quality Inn & Suites Palatka Riverfront in Palatka, Florida, on the beautiful St. Johns River. M.B. and several others will be conducting writing workshops this year. Details and agenda here . Oct. 2024 - Women's Health and Breast Cancer Care Event. The Atlantic Center for the Arts is partnering with Advent Health NSB on October 2, 2024 for an evening focused on mindfulness and women's health . As guest speaker, M.B. will explore the healing power of creativity. Details here . April, 2024. National Poetry Month ACA Poetry Workshops - Get ready to embrace National P oetry Month in April, 2024 by signing up now for Florida Loves Poetry workshops and see why poets are calling these "the best poetry workshops in Florida!" M.B. will host four consecutive Wednesday night classes, 4pm to 6pm, at the Harris House in New Smyrna Beach. Free of charge. Beginners to advanced are welcome, but seating is limited. SOLD OUT Wed., February 28, 2024 7-9pm Patio Poets - Maitland - M.B. will Guest Poet for the evening at the Venue on Lake Lily in Maitland. Her reading will be followed by an Open Mic for poets. All poets are welcome.. January 20, 2024, 5:30-7:15pm The HUB on Canal Poetry Night . M.B. will Guest Poet for the evening during The Hub's open mic monthly event. For info, contact Mary Jane at 386-214-6409. Nov. 19, 2023, 10:30am to 4pm Fall Festival of the Arts - Deland . Poetry readings, open mic, and poetry slam. M.B. and Volusia Poet Laureate Dr. David Axelrod will both read from their works at noon on Sunday at the Chess Park Stage next to the courthouse in downtown Deland. Oct. 25 - Nov. 15, 2023 Poetry Workshops at The HUB on Canal . M.B. will host four poetry workshops that will run on consecutive Wednesdays from 4:30 to 6pm starting on October 25. Serious poets and writers of all skill levels are welcome. SOLD OUT Sept. 16, 202 3 Refreshments and Readings - Barnes & Noble, Tomoka Town Ctr., Daytona Beach, Saturday, Sept. 16. at 2:30 pm. M.B. will be joining author Ginger Pinholster to read from their upcoming works. Ginger will be launching her book Snakes of St. Augustine and M.B. will read from her newest collection, Smiling at the Executioner . Please respond to the evite to reserve you spot. April 2023 ACA Poetry Workshops - SOLD OUT Atlantic Center for the Arts will host their annual poetry workshops at ACA Harris House in New Smyrna Beach throughout poetry month next April. M.B. will host four workshops over the month with the theme "Freeing our poetic voices the formal way". Admission is free. Sign up on ACA's website . UPDATE : The ACA poetry workshops are currently sold out. You can send an email to mbmclatchey@gmail.com if you would like to get onto the standby list. Oct. 21-23, 2022 Florida State Poets Association - Annual Fall Convention The Florida State Poets Association (FSPA ) will hold its annual fall convention in Daytona, Florida at the Marriott Residence Inn Daytona Beach Shores. M.B. will be moderating a panel of experts on the topic of Slam Poetry. Details here. Sep. 22, 2022 - 5:30 - 7:30 PM Breast Cancer Awareness and Prevention Free event sponsored by AdventHealth and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Experience mindfulness activities through meditation and expressive writing. Includes a healthy dinner and refreshments. Open to the Public. Details here. Sep. 27, 2022 - 7:30 PM Miami Poetry Reading J oi n poets January Gill O’Neil and Susan L. Leary at The Betsy-South Beach Library in Miami for an evening of poetry hosted by SWWIM . Arrive early with M.B. to meet the artists at 6:30 PM. Details here . September 10, 2022 (Saturday) Wheaton Writing Academy - Online Workshop Nationally-recognized Wheaton Writing Academy will sponsor a three-hour online workshop, “Unleashing Our Poetic Voices”, with M.B. as host. Beginners to advanced-level poets are all welcome. Time: noon - 3pm. To register or for more info, email wheatonwriter@gmail.com . April 13 - 14, 2022 Miami Poetry Readings Check out SWWIM's list of upcoming events and readings at The Betsy Hotel in South Beach, Miami. April 6, 13, 20, 27 - 2022 ACA Poetry Month Workshops Celebrate National Poetry Month in 2022 with Atlantic Center for the Arts! M.B. will host poetry sessions every Wednesday at 3pm throughout the month of April at ACA Harris House in New Smyrna Beach. Admission is free, but seating is limited. Sign up here . November 3-5, 2021 HundrED Innovation Summit 2021. Join M.B. and education experts from around the world to talk about the future of education. The three days of expert panels, live workshops, and networking with industry representatives are free to all and completely virtual. Details here . November 10 & December 15, 2021 SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) will host poetry readings at The Betsy Hotel in South Beach, Miami at 7pm. October 2021 The 10th Annual Winter Park Paint Out International Poetry Competition is about to begin. Join other poets in creating your own ekphrastic response to a contestant's painting. Find out all of the details here . Entry is free, but, you need to hurry. Sept. 28, 2021 Florida State Poets Association Zoomies ( Originally scheduled for 9/14/21 ) Join the FSPA Zoomies and M.B. for a special presentation at 7:30 p.m. via Zoom. M.B. will read from her new book Beginner's Mind and speak to the topic of "poets writing prose". If you have a question you'd like her to respond to during the presentation, you may email her in advance at mbmclatchey@gmail.com. Attendance is always free for these events. Details here . June 9, 2021 M.B. will be featured as a guest reader for the Midsummer Night's Pensive Reading , hosted on Zoom by Northeastern University's Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service (CSDS) and the New England Poetry Club. Readings start at 7pm. RSVP preferred. May 15, 2021 Beginner's Mind - Book Release. Now available from Regal House Publishing and your favorite book suppliers. May 1, 2021 For a behind the scenes look at M.B.'s new book, Beginner's Mind , check out her interview in the May/June issue of Florida's premier poetry magazine, Of Poets & Poetry . Spring 2021 Fresh Perspectives in Poetry In partnership with Atlantic Center for the Arts and with sponsorship from The Florida Humanities Council, M.B. is hosting a four-part poetry series on Facebook. From the comfort and safety of your home or workplace, join M.B. on a journey of learning from the world's most notable masters. Free of charge and open to the public. Details here .

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, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000. Award Winning Poetry - 2007 Winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize 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, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000. 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 vast 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. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Summer/Fall 2007. Judge's Review Previous Next

Index Previous Next A Drink of Water A tactic for keeping us near, not for staying awake. Still we’d call, Go to sleep! – joke that the well was dry. We don’t see our mistakes right away. I sent his father pushing his whole self: sleep-walker, his father's father, laggard pilgrim. From across the hall, we heard a small boy drink as if he meant to teach us how it’s done: exaggerated gulps, or blessing of the throat, or baptism; the sinking thrill of water filling his bony frame, or drowning him. And then the playful gasp between each self-immersion. The antics of the unconverted. Had he said his prayers? His sadness at the question, his sour objection. One more. One more dog-weary tour and prayer was this encounter of his thirst with ours. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.