Exclusions

“Noah Falck’s Exclusions purports to leave everything out, and yet somehow this book has everything in it: birth, death, rust, sex, smoking, shadows, floodlights, Olympic mascots, how ‘the sun flattens / into a sort of messy bruise / over the lake.’ Falck is a deadpan Nostradamus, dispensing fast-hitting predictions and sour flashes of the past. ‘Teenagers can’t get drunk / fast enough is what you think of / when you think of home.’ These poems are fraught machines that crack and fizzle, that think deeply and resist the low ground, that come from a place of uncanny wildness and heft.”

—Natalie Shapero, author of Hard Child

“‘Poem Excluding Answers,’ a perfect poem and one that happens to capture, in its title, the simultaneous familiar humility and immense daring of the project that is Exclusions… The book will endure. And on re-reading, months or years from now, Exclusions will hold not only for anyone who experienced the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 but also for readers who have experienced all kinds of rug-pulls, upendings, and public or private catastrophes, an uncannily familiar strangeness…”

—Aidan Ryan in The Adroit Journal

“The poems in Noah Falck’s Exclusions conjure worlds in which what’s missing shows us what matters most. Their generous whimsy and poignant metamorphoses are flinty and tender; this is poetry of radiant aftermath and post-industrial magic, of the conversation that remains after ‘all your lines have been cut / and I don’t have a mouth.’ Falck invites us to see with more feeling, to grin with more bearing, to care like it can change us. ‘The heart is the most donated organ,’ he writes; in this book of absences, the heart is never missing.”

—Zach Savich, author of Diving Makes The Water Deep

“There is something both mysterious and grounding about Noah Falck’s recent work, Exclusions… a small earthquake that jostles you alive and awake, yet changed.”

—Alexis David in The Diagram

“Exclusions keeps us off balance, stumbling forward, and absolutely alive with both the inventive possibilities of lyric poetry and that rare experience of watching the genre redefine itself in a pair of this art’s most capable hands.”

—Michael McGriff, author of Home Burial

“Falck’s gloom’s a playful one, and his Exclusions creep into and around our midst in order to ask a little something of us. Gentle but jarring, these poems let us in to where we are. The password is you.”

—Graham Foust, author of Nightingalelessness

“Any person, no matter their interests, will find something to relish in this book; a poem perhaps, mysteriously addressed specifically to them.”

—Will Stanier in Heavy Feather Review

“There’s something about poetry that alters you in all the best ways…” Read the review by Kevin Heffernan of the Rise Collective.