Time Capsules

Here, the faraway is as local as chokecherries…

Time Capsules is Kendall Dunkelberg’s second full-length collection of poetry. In it he explores themes of love, marriage, and fatherhood against the backdrop of contemporary American life, ranging from his childhood home in Iowa to Mississippi, where he has lived for the past 15 years. Cross-country travel to Massachusetts, New Mexico, Alabama, and Georgia, as well as a honeymoon in Spain, inform his vision. These poems traverse myth and memory through cycles of nature and culture, life and death, to arrive at a tranquil, if tenuous, sense of equilibrium.

ISBN-13: 978-1-933896-31-1 or ISBN-10: 1-933896-31-0

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Praise for Time Capsules

Kendall Dunkelberg’s Time Capsules encompass eloquence and sense, memory and implication. These skillful poems give us much to admire, and even more to taste, to see. Here, the faraway is as local as chokecherries, as the calls of the catbird and turtle dove, as walking a dog through Possum Town, as a long cup of coffee at the Czech Inn of Spillville, Iowa. As W.B. Yeats advised, Dunkelberg has packed the personal in ice and salt. His ice has sparkle, and his salt, poignancy. Time Capsules is a complete pleasure.

Angela Ball, author of Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds

These poems excel in their clarity and vividness. They take us on journeys both exterior and interior, where a meditation on something as small as the sprouting of an iris or as large as rivers and prairies reveals the emotional life that hovers beneath the brilliant surface

John Bensko, author of Sea Dogs, Gray Wolf Press and The Iron City

The agrarian values are not as fugitive as we once assumed—a particular hill or road, a particular flower or animal, sometimes just off the interstate, will embody the evanescence of “unassuming forms of beauty.” In a flower’s “calm green leaves,” in a catbird’s “elusive, /alluring” presence, and in scores of manifestations, Kendall Dunkelberg discovers “a silver /sanctuary where we can rest.” His time capsules stave off the heartache of urban modernity by acknowledging that its losses are perverse exaggerations of a more elemental loss at the heart of beauty itself. These poems keep low to the ground. These poems are magnificent. They never lose heart.

Richard Lyons, author of Fleur Carnivore