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.”

Noah Falck is the author of Snowmen Losing Weight (BatCat Press, 2012), You Are In Nearly Every Future (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), and the co-editor of My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poets.org, and has been anthologized in Poem-A-Day 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams Books, 2015). He lives in Buffalo, New York, where he works as Education Director at Just Buffalo Literary Center and curates the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry series inside a 130-foot abandoned grain elevator.