Selected Publications
The Invisible World
This book began as a conversation with a single, troubling and troublesome ancestor.
The poems included make visible the compromised intimacy of a life in love with places that still hold some remaining wildness and the inhabitants of these places in the hope of healing some small wound among the injuries wrought by ancestry, an ancestor’s voice, and what has followed from his voice.
Matt’s new collection is available from Unsolicited Press.
Praise for The Invisible World
-
"In The Invisible World, Matt Daly’s poems guide us into the roughly beautiful wilderness with keen observations and challenging conversations with his complicated ancestor, Cotton Mather. We find ourselves by connecting, departing, and reflecting on the ghosts and gestures of mosquito pokes, bat wings, flash of mountain lion crossing our headlights, and messages delivered by crows and ravens. Daly’s poems beautifully blend together dream, the listening pines, and the wash of river so they cling to us like the burrs and seeds we carry all the way home."
—Juan J. Morales, author of The Handyman’s Guide to End Times
Between Here and Home
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.
Matt’s first book-length collection is available from Unsolicited Press.
Praise for Between Here and Home
-
“Between Here and Home is a resounding American song that makes pure music from the dark notes of kept secrets and the clashing chords of human love. Matt Daly is a maestro of the natural world, a heart-rending lyricist of beauty and belief. These poems take my breath away."
Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe.
-
“These poems are not just an eloquent narrative of the rural American West, they are a story of place and the people in it and an exploration of the relationships that make a small town. These, at times, impressionistic poems unfold with the forward motion that resists sentimentality and reveal heartbreak and wonder. Daly celebrates the West, but there is sorrow in equal measure. In language and form that are clear and true, Daly writes a kind of love letter to the West, and the people who shape it. Their voices form a kind of chorus to the landscape that asks them to bear witness.”
Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award
-
"Between Here and Home has the fascinating plot and pacing of a novel, the compressed narrative energy of flash fiction, the essayistic themes of nonfiction, and the lyric, nuanced integrity of poetry. Daly has built a world here, and in doing so creates home and homage to a real but unnamed western place with its highway, river, KOA, homesteads, bar stools, its local characters and animals that both inhabit and haunt this place. It’s a compelling read whether from front to back as in fiction, or opening to any page as in poetry."
Laurie Kutchins, author of The Night Path & Slope of the Child Everlasting
Red State
Matt’s chapbook is available from Seven Kitchens Press
-
KHOL Interview
Hear Matt talk about Between Here and Home as well as his chapbook, Red State.
-
Spoken Words (podcast)
Hear Matt talk about Between Here and Home (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and read three poems from the collection.
-
Plant Apparitions
Read a poem in Panhandler Magazine from The Invisible World (Unsolicited Press2024.
-
Striped Skunk
Hear Matt read a poem in Red Ogre Review from The Invisible World (Unsolicited Press, 2024)
-
At First Light
Read Matt’s poem “At First Light” published by Deep Wild
-
Cortland Review
Read Matt’s poems published in three issues of The Cortland Review