Michael Beadle

Michael Beadle is a poet, author and writer-in-residence living in Raleigh, North Carolina. For the past twenty-two years, he’s taught poetry and creative writing workshops across the state, and performed poetry at schools, churches and festivals. He’s the author of several poetry collections, including Beasts of Eden (Press 53). His poems have appeared in journals such as Kakalak, River Heron Review, and the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina. His short fiction has appeared in moonShine review, Apple Valley Review and BOMBFIRE. Beadle has served as a guest editor for Prime Number Magazine, poet-in-residence at the NC Zoo in Asheboro, A+ Fellow for the NC A+ Schools program, instructor at Duke Young Writers’ Camp (Duke University), emcee for the state finals of NC Poetry Out Loud, and student contest manager for the NC Poetry Society.

Lifting each rock,

we felt its weight in our palms,

closed our eyes

until a name arose….

Even as a child, as the first poem in Beasts of Eden reveals, Michael Beadle took upon himself the joyous burden of naming even the all-too-often unnamable things of this world.

In this new collection, Beadle lures us into a realm of fact and fantasy, of history and myth, where we are all—at once—both native and stranger, neighbor and trespasser. With senses so alert to the sounds, the tastes, the textures, the sights, and smells of this world, nothing escapes the fresh wit and seasoned wisdom of this big-hearted poet.

Here is a poet who wields a magician’s pen that is both worldly and colloquial, as at home in the past as it is in the present. Give yourself—and everyone you love—the gift of this beautiful new collection.

—Cathy Smith Bowers, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers