Matthew Ulland’s manuscripts have been finalists for the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize and the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize, and semi-finalists for several other prizes. “Retreat,” published in Illuminations, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Where to find his poems:

Anima (UK): “Shrinking Man” and “Prayer to No One in Particular”

Barbaric Yawp: “A Door, Opening”

Barrow Street: “Self Portrait on My 44th Birthday”

The Blue Mouse: “Night Animals”

Border Crossing: “This Old House”

Clementine: “I Woke in the Green Light,” “Our Gang” and “Lost House”

Coe Review: “Subway Gospel”

Concho River Review: “My Father Is a Horse,” “Body Farm”

The Cortland Review: “Tattoo” and “On Palmer Lake”

Dappled Things: “Brushy Creek”

Entelechy International: A Journal of Ideas: “The Ambassador of Melancholy” and “Sitting Up in the Night”

Gris-Gris: “Metropolitan Book of the Dead”

Handsy: “Cotton Candy”

Hanging Loose: “Empress, Alexandria”

Illuminations: “Evening, Coda” and “Retreat” (nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

Indian River Review: “At the YMCA”

The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food: “Musa Paradisiaca”

LIT: “Junk Yard” and “What We Did During the Blackout”

Little River: “The Fool,” “Gospel,” and “Totem”

Loch Raven Review: “Fireflies” and “Front Page, Local News”

The Meadowland Review: “Tenebrae”

MiPOesias: “Last Call”

Naugatuck River Review: “Times Square Sybil”

Prairie Schooner: “Roots”

Sequestrum: “Theophany,” “Everything Changes, Nothing Perishes,” “Exhale,” and “I Did My Best”

Texas Triangle: “Dream and Absence”

Tygerburning: “Poem”

The Unrorean: “How to Yes I Will Yes”

Yellow Chair Review: “When We Fought” and “Spring and All That”

Listen to “Last Call,” first published in MiPOesias:

Read an interview with the author from Sequestrum

Chapbook: The Sound in the Corn, Finishing Line Press.

Reviews for The Sound in the Corn

With remarkable quietude and composure, Matt Ulland’s poems record the soul’s encounter with the manifold and numinous world–now perfect in its glory, now stark and insufficient. Charged with wonder and terror, reverence and doubt, they listen “like a prayer listens,” speak as the corn speaks, “hushed…rustling.” Even when God grows achingly absent, and the earth is “full of silences and emptied spaces,” the soul, rising to accept the benediction of a coming dawn, abides.

—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife; Stumble, Gorgeous; Like Family; Ticket to Ride and other books

In 19 spare, striking lyric poems, Matthew Ulland captures the beauty, strangeness, joy, and terror of human encounters with the elemental world of nature. He celebrates American landscapes with a kind of prayerful attention that makes the poems shine.

—Joan Larkin, author of My Body: New and Selected Poems; Cold River; Blue Hanuman and other books