Florida Loves Poetry!! ™ " W riting must be taught in a way that emphasizes discovery and growth of the student-writer’s voice, rather than emphasizing adaptation of a writer’s voice to a history of literature or to current trends in literature." - M.B., 2017 Poetry Workshops Testimonials from Participants: This was a beautiful program, and it expanded my creative spirit and soul. - ACA 2023 This program was great for stretching the imagination. I wish it was ongoing! - ACA 2023 M.B. shared her insight in such an engaging and inspiring way. I truly learned a lot in this course, and it made me fall even more in love with writing and sharing poetry. - ACA 2023 I have never had a formal poetry class. I loved Everything. M.B. led with an ease, love and expertise to elicit and stretch our diverse class. Amazing. - ACA 2023 Wonderful! My mind and heart are elevated! - ACA 2023 This was the best poetry course I’ve ever taken, and I’ve taken college poetry classes. I have a MA in English. M.B. really inspires and gives us amazing examples and tools to become better writers. - ACA 2023 M.B. is so professional and engaging. My heart is happy. My mind stimulated. - ACA 2023 I loved the facilitator, M.B. She’s an excellent teacher. Great person. - ACA 2023 Fun class! - ACA 2023 The best poetry course in Florida! - A. M. Wow - who knew you would be there when I finally decided to let on I'm a poet ready to write again. Thank God! Thank you! Thank you, ACA, for facilitating this series! - L. M. I just loved your class. Thank you for facilitating this workshop! We covered so much in four weeks. It was a wonderful experience and I look forward to working with you again! So sorry this is ending… it was so wonderful. - V. I. Thank you for creating such a wonderful space to create! - C B. The workshop on poetry that M. B. McLatchey ran was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in a long time. As a professional singer I have sung so many poems and studied them but never tried my hand at writing one. I was nervous since most were already "poets". M. B. immediately made me comfortable and I felt at ease to share what I was doing. She was supportive and encouraging and has made me want to continue writing poetry. I would take another workshop with her at the drop of a hat. I cannot thank her enough for the insights and guidance she provided in an atmosphere of kindness and support. - L. S. I have very much enjoyed this course with you and wish it could go on much longer! Thank you! - G. H. Thank you for your inspired leadership during this workshop experience. I sincerely regret having missed the first two sessions. My friend Carole invited me to your next to last session and I was smitten by your gentle and knowledgeable style. My goodness - how fortunate for us you are willing to teach, lead, and inspire fellow poets! - L. M. I have really enjoyed your enthusiasm and insights into what can make better poetry. I have enjoyed meeting and interacting with the other poets…both those whom I know and others whose voices continue to inspire . - D. H.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Ezra , Spring 2019 Prev 3 Next THE HAND AND THE WRITING I let my hand run through my dream sudden wakeups thirsty in the invention of the word the other side of pain and the truth of the page A MÃO E A ESCRITA Deixo a mão correr pelo meu sonho num sobressalto sedento no invento da palavra pelo avesso da pena e a lisura da página Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Ezra , Spring 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

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 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

Award Winning Poetry - 2005 Winner of the Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously. Flips through a magazine I'm embarrassed to be buying. Studies its regimen for shapely thighs, asks me - because she's heard - if drinking wine is good for nursing. The shift from idle chitchat to appeal. Camille, her nametag says. Camille of olive skin and violet nails with long metallic tips, who flashes her lover's sucking marks like her stigmata. Camille who isn't showing yet - but like Crivelli's virgin martyr Catherine, peers sidelong at me and leans decoratively against her register as Catherine did against her studded wheel. So clearly Catherine that I want to look away - or kneel. And yet, Crivelli would have framed her differently: a martyr tucked away with other martyrs in a predella of muted colors, quiet suffering. None of this heart-to-heart - this girlfriend talk that brings to mind a string of small petitions and makes me say my part. Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the Annie Finch Prize, 2005. Judge: Margot Schlipp Published in The National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2005. Previous Next

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Index Previous Next Emperical God So the unmovable mover is one both in definition and in number; therefore there is one god and one heaven alone. ― Aristotle Start with the known, the way a child begins. A child begins by calling all men father . Then, later on distinguishes. Father : burrower, planter of unharvestable spring. Mother , first rope and ring tossed to a budding glove – a sustenance, like air or love. Love, that triggering nerve that in the Greek origin myth substitutes touch for a god’s imperative: union of sky and sea, sea and earth. Luminous bodies coupling like first birds. Call it one god, one heaven when learned through its carcass and seed – Palm. Milk. Soul. Wing. Palm, fallow field surrendering its feed. Milk, an ancient man’s mother’s plan. Soul, a rusted bell ringing, striped buoy bobbing, bobbing. Wing, a triumph and sudden cold. . Published in Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, Fall/Winter 2006.

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Index Previous Next Morning in Three Movements I I lie in my own pasty pool like a lamb in a druid’s bed. Layer by layer, thread after thread, I shed and shed. O, press me between your palms again! Deliverer, be delivered. Without your need, without a guise to beautify, what am I? II. I know her layers far better than she. Scales that I peel in a rush of steam. My tongue, her arch, her bending knee. The soft between her legs where I redeem myself, the way the Great Throwdini did, who earned his life, her love, by sparing them. Without her bristling flesh, oh what am I? III. In this morning light, I am almost transparent, a sheet of shimmering snow that holds another person’s fears – once in this tight embrace, twice in this lingering scent, this care, this newfound air. Answers to Riddles in Reverse: I: paos fo rab II : rozar III. eussit . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.

Index Previous Next Washday After Grandma Moses So hard to know the subject: a meadow, dead center of oils in green? Or left of it, this hyperactive wash scene: milky-white shirts scattered on the green's mossy edge. Rows of blanched sheets fluttering from taut lines that hem the green, that keep the women with their laundry always receding. And opposite the sheets, a picket fence that seems to frame the spongy grades of green and lime and ask us to reflect on - what? Something the women and the others have quietly agreed to turn away from. Look how they crowd their way into the margins. Here, a harvest story: flecks of red gathered into baskets. Words being said between the harvesters. Words so compelling that one of them stands upright to view the other. Is he facing the painting's question? Or does he only seem to look at him because they share this tiny patch of goldenrod and green and picket fences? Easy to grant: this kind of ground that parcels out our senses. And far, far off from center, a first or last encounter: a woman stops as she exits a dark, cool shed - stops, not to adjust to the day's stark light but to feel the gaze of a man more painted than she, to feel the thrust of sepia: his suit, dabbed on like that line of aging wood outside the shed; like the sepia dresses of the women nearby; like the silo, sepia and Indian red, that hedge her in. Roads leading in, but not to the center of life. Only the large white house, the same starched white as the sheets the women hang. Windows with shades half-drawn so evenly that they have clearly been painted on. A front door shut so tight that it disappears, at times, as white will against white. The chimney (and so, the hearth) an afterthought in browns and burgundy. Is this the cache of colors then that comes with knowing one's lot? The end of looking east or west? The fertile ground fenced off? . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in Ekphrasis , Fall/Winter 2006.

Index Previous Next Melville's Reader With an ease that belies his theme my boy slumps into a mold of his own small back. Chair or taffrail? The waves blend with his thoughts. And far, far out of range, I search my heart for a send off: To follow a runaway's lead? His optimism? To see our little horrors and be social with them? A summer breeze. And now the pages turn themselves; he shifts and shifts. Perhaps the helmsman stares now at the flaming try-works, sees the shapes: harpooners poling, pitching that hissing mass -- a reckoning so stark he slips into a soporific dream then suddenly comes to, but dead astern, his mind ignited wondering how to save the ship from being brought to lee. I remember reading that scene until I could recite it. But now, he lays the book like open wings across his lap and basks and basks in summer's luxurious light. I watch him like a swabber come to save a listing ship and keep a kind of vigil while he naps. Was God above young Ishmael as he packed his bag for Cape Horn, the Pacific? Or, in New Bedford, when he read the fate of whale men? An average, good-hearted, dreamer at the masthead. Watcher not watching, chatting with Queequeg. O little dreamer, never in more danger than on your sunny perch, move your foot or hand an inch, loosen your grip and midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Winter/Spring 2008.

Index Previous Next 2012 Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children B efore we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound. I f one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked for you sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened. N ascent. Still blooming, the orchid on your window sill. A thrill of color. G one. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Phantom limb. If the soul leaves the body, we did not feel it go. Nothing and everything cloistered in stone. O mens we left for others. Ripples on a resting pond. The whistling of a breeze. The imprint on the ovaries. . Copyright © 2012 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2012 Adirondack Review's 46er Prize for Poetry. Published in The Adirondack Review , Summer 2013. Original version published here . The 46er Prize refers to the forty-six major peaks of the Adirondacks. Hikers who reach all forty-six summits are deemed "Forty-sixers." Also published by Beacon Press in The Blue Room Collective's anthology, Grabbed , Summer 2020.