There is something both mysterious and grounding about Noah Falck's recent work, Exclusions, a book of poetry that borders off ideas, nouns, conflicts, holidays, moments in time, diseases, objects, athletic pursuits, contests, and people—and in doing so, opens up spatial territory to loss, grief, memory, disturbance, happiness, joy, all the kinds of love, hurt, help, and other emotional experiences that gut us deeply.
     By excluding such things as the "future" he instead invites "the sky" which "is all/truffles and shoe polish" (7). And is able to turn that same sky into "a cemetery full of/children trapped in moonlight" (7). The turns in Falck's poetry are both startling and unassuming; at first, they terrify you, then soothe. Perhaps the point of a poem, if poems have points, is to turn the world upside down for a moment, a small earthquake that jostles you alive and awake, yet changed.
     This world shaking doesn't seem to be a coincidence. In an interview with Aidan Ryan for Rain Taxi in 2018, Noah Falck defines poems as worlds. Each of the poems in Exclusions does feel like a small, strange world that we have stepped into and then suddenly there is an earthquake. For instance, see the last line in "Poem Excluding Romance": "As the day grows/into night in bedrooms lit by scented/candles, and the obscure noise in the attic announces how soon the dead/become song" (24). The literary magazine, Winter Tangerine, published not only this finished poem but also the drafts, allowing us to peer into Falck's creative process. Images shift in the revisions. French horns become tubas become song. We see how his mind tunnels down into his subconscious. The nouns, which were once physical objects, soon become abstracted into song. This reveals an association between the dead and music that feels right. It seems the right choice to zoom out from an instrument and into the word "song" which has a nice sound quality: rich with a deep, bellowing "o" sound, as it ties the connection between words and sound and creates the music of the ghosts who sing in the attics.
     Falck's poems, although acting as other worlds, still call out to our current cultural context here on Planet Earth and here in America. In his poem "Poem Excluding Gun Control" he writes of "the neighborhood kids/who pull triggers between gasps of laughter" (40). I think of my own westside Buffalo neighborhood and the man I saw walking down the street late at night, a gun in his hand and a stony, scary expression on his face, the sound of gunfire still pulsating through the dangerously boring, firecracker, COVID summer we've had this year. Maybe a poem isn't just meant to shake the earth below your feet but to offer you a refuge you didn't know existed.
     Falck is a well-known poet in Buffalo. I first found his work in The Buffalo News. It was taped to the wall of a college where I was teaching. I admired the gentle tone, the carefully selected words and yet the force behind it. Falck's name is synonymous with an innovative poetry series where poets speak into the hollow, reverberation of rusted-out grain silos. He is not only an observer of a city that is changing, but also someone actively changing it in his work as Education Director for Just Buffalo Literary Center. He allows a certain kind of America, the Rust Belt, to become a character in his work. In "Poem Excluding Happy Hour," Falck references the mild alcoholism of a once downtrodden city that is trying to come back on top: "The dark feels its way through the/crowd, shows up after the hit & run/on Main Street. Those out of breath/prepare for the credits to run. Those/out of work build a river outside our/window" (23).
     Exclusions is such an important body of work because it challenges intrusion. It allows for privacy. The "you" in his poems speaks to someone close to the narrator but with whom the reader is not intimate. When I read it, I placed my husband in each “you” and “ours” and felt the same romance that Neruda invites, as seen in this dreamy number: "If somewhere had a voice/it would come to us like fog . . .Or when you/called my body a surrealist's/dream with a kickstand" (5).
     Falck is a domestic poet: "Our children in the backseat become the moral of the story—startling us with their propaganda, with sudden musicality, with their small, loose teeth" (41). He is concerned with the close, interior spaces of our everyday lives—and more so, because he cares for children in his poetry: "And today every child is born into whatever space is available. We wait for snowfall—maybe/learn another language. / A language built around/the idea of far, far away" (25). His poems are not just big planetary worlds, but the worlds of home, of children, paired with the worlds of sky. There is more sky in these poems than I thought possible. Perhaps because Falck is originally from the Midwest, he notices the sky more than others. Suddenly, these poems become imaginary landscapes, where domestic spaces open to big, endless skies or narrators who bring the sky inside. He writes: "Near the back of the plane I wave a flag completely constructed of stars. You wake up in a yawn of turbulence and watch a river 30,000 feet below snake away like jazz" (54).
     Falck has a subtle sense of humor in this book. In "Poem Excluding Air Quotes," I expected a comment on conversations that include air quotes, but instead he roped this off and allowed for the small, beautiful, private moment of death, where "the darkness was making/a meal of the world" (38).
     Recently, I heard Falck read one night over Zoom. He sat in what appeared to be the attic of his house. When I tuned in, there was only an empty attic, dark except for minimal reading light. I wondered if this was "Poetry Reading Excluding Poet," but then he appeared. He walked in with music playing, sat down, and began almost immediately to read. He read somberly and in a gentle way. The voice of a good father reading his children to sleep. I sat in my small office and wondered about all the other people who had tuned in. It felt like a private moment between poetry and the universe. As if he had collected all these words and was sharing them with us. As if poems were secrets that required exclusions of some big things. As if they were carved out spaces where we could go to see the rich, fertile soil of the spaces inside ourselves and each other.