The Lame God
80 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:05 Oct 2013
ISBN:9780874219081
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Sep 2013
ISBN:9780874219074
Winner of 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award
In The Lame God, author M. B. McLatchey reminds us of the inevitable bond between art and empathy. With a controlled language that finds its echo chamber in the immortal themes and characters of classical literature, this courageous work accompanies the author on her journey through a parent’s anguish in the face of a horrific crime. Using the art of poetry she gives voice to a suffering—and a love—that might otherwise go unheard.
In The Lame God, author M. B. McLatchey reminds us of the inevitable bond between art and empathy. With a controlled language that finds its echo chamber in the immortal themes and characters of classical literature, this courageous work accompanies the author on her journey through a parent’s anguish in the face of a horrific crime. Using the art of poetry she gives voice to a suffering—and a love—that might otherwise go unheard.
The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.
There can be no healing, no closure. Still, if your traumatic experiences don’t destroy you they can produce masterful works, in which human nature rises to its heights . . . The effect is powerful, and as a result of the author’s disciplining her wildest emotions, we weep for her.’
—From the foreword by Edward Field, American poet and essayist and contest judge
This book is crushing and brilliantly written. If ever there were a time for McLatchey’s deeply moving and compassionate poems, it is now with the crazed, unchecked violence against our children. There are no elegies here, only a powerful intellect at work and a truly gifted poet’s heartbreaking songs to our lost children.’
–Jeffrey Greene, author of Beautiful Monsters
In magisterial cadences, this powerful poetic sequence gives voice to the unspeakable and transposes profound grief into immortal song. McLatchey's poems are talismans and spells—not against loss but against forgetting.’
–Philip Brady, author of Fathom and co-founder of Etruscan Press
M. B. McLatchey holds degrees in comparative literature and languages, in teaching, and in English literature from Harvard University, Brown University, and Williams College, as well as the MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. A widely published poet and scholar with an extensive background in literature, philosophy, and ancient and modern languages. She has received numerous awards including the Harvard University Danforth Prize, the Harvard/Radcliffe Prize for Literary Scholarship, and the Brown University Elmer Smith Award for Teaching. Her most recent poetry awards include the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, the Spoon River Poetry Review’s Editors’ Prize, the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, and the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award. She has also authored and edited a compilation of Greek and Roman readings titled Primary Sources. With over twenty years of experience teaching humanities and literature to college students, she is currently a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Visit her at www.corvidwriters.org/mbm.
