Tree Fall with Birdsong
Fernwood Press, 978-1-59498-160-9
Tree Fall with Birdsong explores the natural world around the poet’s home in Mississippi and delves into memories of the rural landscapes of Iowa where he was raised and other places he has traveled. These poems look to the natural life cycle as a corollary of loss and renewal, both in response to illness and death of family and friends and to the collective sense of grief in the wake of the recent pandemic. Often overlooked details of daily life and nature lead to deep insight. Mortality, seen in “Tree Fall” with the loss of steadfast and familiar trees, is complemented by the creative force of “Birdsong.” The poems range in form and length from narrative free verse to a sequence of haiku, a pantoum, a ghazal, and a creation story. They include ekphrastic poems, retell myths of the underworld, and connect to the lore of wildflowers, snakes, birds, and trees.
Kendall Dunkelberg is available for readings, book signings, and other events at bookstores, libraries, and schools through December 2025 and beyond. See the Events page for more info on recent and upcoming events.
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Interview: Rooted Magazine
Praise
Hauntingly personal yet welcoming lyrics, painstakingly crafted in delightful, accessible language.
Claude Wilkinson, author of World Without End
The keenly attentive poems of Kendall Dunkelberg’s Tree Fall with Birdsong reveal his long immersion in the losses and continuities of the natural world and the ways in which the other-than-human can instruct us in the pleasure and pain of being human.
Ann Fisher-Wirth, coeditor of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and author of Paradise ls Jagged; Mississippi Poet Laureate
Tree Fall with Birdsong is a sharp-eyed meditation on the natural world and the nature of being human. With extraordinary insight, Dunkelberg considers again and again an essential question: “What is mortality in the face of this life”?
Jacqueline Allen Trimble, author of How to Survive the Apocalypse
Extended Bio
Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. He graduated from Osage Community High School, Osage, Iowa, and has degrees in English from Knox College and in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and Fulbright Scholar to Belgium in 1992 and 2006, and he is a translator of Dutch and Flemish poetry and prose.
He is the editor of Poetry South and has published three prior collections of poetry, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as the creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing.
His poems have recently appeared in Tar River Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Juke Joint, River Mouth Review, Peauxdunque Review, and Salvation South, as well as the anthologies Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets.
Kendall Dunkelberg 