Killdeer is a bracingly original collection of autobiographical "essay-poems" in which author Phil Hall ponders his formation as a poet, looking critically (and with wry humour) at his writing process and paying tribute to writers in his "literary family." In his meditation on the killdeer as his "totem bird" (it fakes injury to lure predators away from its nest, which he compares to being emotionally manipulative in poems), Hall criticizes poetic forms that "dummy-down/the complexity of impression/expression"; that charge could never be levelled at his work.

Killdeer won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in 2011, and was also a finalist for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.