Matt Daly
Wyoming-based poet, artist and teacher.
Matt Daly
Matt Daly is a Wyoming-based poet, artist and teacher. Primarily working with words, he regularly draws upon the imagery and rhythms of his homeground in the American West. That said, Matt also gravitates toward explorations of new territory and looks forward to those moments when his work takes a turn in an unexpected direction.
Basin and Range
Even in this place, there is always
a coast. One plate dives and lifts
another up. We are left
to our faults. We state
the obvious: every country topples
under its own weight or the sharp
edge of another land looming over it.
I’ve lived here all my life: this earth;
the slow waves of glaciers
that held parts from underneath
and then drew back; this season
of melt, of thaw, of wildfire
ash and smoke. We may be giving up
but not yet what we need
to give up. Waves leave what is
lost from the deep and what
we throw out. I put a shard
of a shell to my ear,
and a private jet roars
into the airspace above the national
park. Remember sitting next to the quiet
hospital bed? The undulations
of curtain and sheet? How dim?
Like that, what we did. Like that.
Sixth Finch, Spring 2025
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The Invisible World
MATT DALY
The poem in THE INVISIBLE WORLD reach for a language and way of living with the wild world that celebrated being a part of our living planet rather than apart from it.
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Between Here and Home
MATT DALY
BETWEEN HERE AND HOME stitches together a narrative through soliloquies from several inhabitants of an imagined rural valley in the American West. Distance and wind make the fabric thin but not always easy to tear.
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Red State
MATT DALY
RED STATE is a chapbook selected by Dan Vera and Ron Mohring as Number 10 in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series.