Exclusions

by Noah Falck

Natalie Shapero writes, “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.”

Genres: Poetry

55 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2020

About the author

Noah Falck is the author of Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020), Snowmen Losing Weight (BatCat Press, 2012) and the chapbooks You Are In Nearly Every Future, Celebrity Dream Poems, Life As A Crossword Puzzle, & Measuring Tape For The Midwest.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book would be good at any time, I think, but it's one of the first full-length poetry collections I read during the ongoing shelter-in-place order here in Illinois during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, its premise of exclusions--what we can and cannot have, no matter how much we want or do not want it--was especially resonant.

[Aidan Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As plain-talking and accessible as a Billy Collins book but as mysterious as a manuscript of ancient prayers or the recorded dreams of saints, Noah Falck's Exclusions is the kind of book you want to force all your friends to read. There are only a few books of poetry that I love so much -- and that I so feel *deserve* to be loved, *will* be loved by everyone -- that I regularly drop-ship them to friends without warning. I have done this with Exclusions.

This book is full of bone-deep truths about the feeling-tone of contemporary life. War, small talk, happy hour, marriage, playgrounds, politics -- there's much here that the contemporary reader will recognize and see anew. Yet Falck speaks *from* the contemporary moment without speaking directly *of* it -- which gives the book a timelessness, serene and grand and wise.

Each poem works to create a world without the object, person, or idea named in its title. But there's a trickery here -- as so many now have noted, the exclusion always has a way of shaping the poem-world, even though it leaves no discernable trace. What is purportedly excluded -- war, politics, cancer, happy hours -- becomes, upon the reader's inverted contemplation, vaster than we ever imagined. In reading these poems you can switch your focus endlessly between the words on the page and the lacuna that the title suggests -- and with each adjustment see or hear something new. In this way each poem is a bottomless nesting doll of presences inside absences inside presences.

And if you aren't in the mood for mystery, meditation, a thunderclap, a sequence of koans, you can read this book simply and straightforwardly for the beauty and clarity of its language.

Get this book. Enjoy reading it, enjoying knowing it, and enjoy sharing in it with a steadily growing community of admirers.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of humor and heart, this is a tender and fantastical offering of observation, dream-talk surrealism and an awareness of absence. This book interacts with the ‘without’. It spotlights the gone. Missing mathematics and morning breath, excluding children and gun control. Does excluding nostalgia make something more nostalgic?

My interview with Falck: http://www.neonpajamas.com/blog/noah-...

[Matthew Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

We've lost so much with the pandemic. A whole year of exclusions -- traditions, close relationships, laughter between acquaintances, among others -- in our life. Although largely written before the pandemic, Falck's book of poetry offers insights into our pandemic condition, a collective discourse on the theme of absence. By understanding what something is not, or perhaps by what the world would be like sans its presence, we can better grasp what something provides into our lives. Falck demonstrates this masterfully with these collected insights into our human condition.

Try on 'Poem Excluding Elegy' for size, and you'll hopefully see what I mean. I couldn't imagine the past year in which this poetry was excluded from my experience. But I suspect Falck could.

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are driving on a road surrounded by asphalt fields. Fireflies keep coming out of the tape deck. It is becoming difficult to see the mannikin you have dressed to look like you in the passenger seat.

[Kyle Marler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an amazing collection of poems. Preternaturally fitted for this moment in time. Melancholy and thoughtful and precise.