Michael David Madonick attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he received a BA in English and an MBA. After several years in real estate development in New York, he returned to school and received his MFA from the University of Oregon. His awards include the Academy of American Poet’s Prize, the New Jersey Council on the Arts “Distinguished Artist” Award, an Illinois Arts Council Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. For more than twenty years he has been teaching creative writing at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. He is currently the poetry editor of Ninth Letter. His first book, Waking The Deaf Dog, was published by Avocet Press, New York. He is married to Brigit, and they have three children and four grand-children.

Other poems by Michael David Madonick in Verse Daily:
May 14, 2006:   "Geese, Landing" " Even as they come in..."

Books by Michael David Madonick:

Other poems on the web by Michael David Madonick:
Two poems

About Bulrushes:

"The figure of the infant Moses—child of slavery, exile, captivity; lying in an ark of woven bulrushes “daubed…with slime”—is the figure for this remarkable collection. “Bring on the damn swans,” the book begins, as poem by poem it strips away “art” to uncover beauty, and we find the grounds for belief, for in Madonick’s hard reckoning we discover that, like the prey’s vulnerability to the predator, we are nonetheless “as good as danger is.” Through extraordinary range and mastery of diction and music, Madonick pits the confusions and destructions of the present, both natural and human, against the consolation and tested experience of lyric. And lyric wins—for Bulrushes is poetry itself, that fragile ark of language in which hope is borne."
—William Wenthe

"Moses and Jesus—those elegiac infants turned most famous of prophets—draw back the curtains on Madonick’s newest collection, Bulrushes. And, as if we were on watch in a hunter’s blind, the creatures revealed to us—bird, deer, snake, whale, children, wife, and parents—believe themselves unobserved, when in fact they are at their most liminal and vividly rendered. Gentler than Jeffers, as sharp as Jarrell, Madonick proves his mastery over the craft in every line, each image and phrase evoking the sensory world, and underworld, in ways that improve upon both. As a reader, I entered this book fully, and it held me."
—Kathy Fagan