Exclusions - by Noah Falck (Paperback)

About the Book

Noah Falck's Exclusion project observes the comprehensive interdependency of the world by leaving things out. A suite of experiments, each writing a specific idea, theme, or object out of the poem, and recording with a wry eye how the whole stands or falls, it inventories with deft strokes the large in the small and the small in the large.

Book Synopsis

What happens when a central part of life as we know it does not exist? Noah Falck's latest collection answers this question in a playfully gloomy way that reveals the strange edges of our reality. Anyone who has experienced that rug-pulling sensation of change, of strangeness, will relate to Noah Falk's Exclusions. Each lyric poem "excludes" a common subject, including topics such as fiction, modern technology, answers, government, and romance. By setting these subjects against a backdrop of obscurity and strangeness, Falck skillfully keeps readers invested and off-balance. Exclusions brings readers into a world where "the wind is nothing more than a brilliant collection of sighs" and "the sun flattens into a sort of messy bruise over the lake." Even excluding many of the things we take for granted, Falck's lyric poetry includes so much: death, smoke, shadows, sadness, history. This collection will leave readers with a changed perspective on what is necessary, and how to deal with immense change. A 2020 Believer Book Awards Finalist, Exclusions has been praised for its ability to "[keep readers] 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." This is a genre-defining book of poetry that allows us to look into the past, present, and future to understand "the foundations of sadness beginning with the needs of children."

Review Quotes

"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

"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

"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