The sky was a concussion of cloudsand notorious for dropping everythingat a moment’s notice. And the fog,how it removed everything and then it didn’t.People gathered in the distance and made historyuntil it hurt. They devoured field after fieldwith bad ideas and took pride in thegroomed ruins. It was never a photoopportunity. The mood when the forestmet the asphalt: Too little, too late.
Poem Excluding City
Noah Falck
Feature Date
- January 7, 2021
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“Poem Excluding City” from EXCLUSIONS: by Noah Falck.
Published by Tupelo Press 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Noah Falck.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Marcus Jackson
Marcus Jackson
Noah Falck is the author of the poetry collections Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020) and Snowmen Losing Weight (BatCat Press, 2012), as well as several chapbooks including You Are In Nearly Every Future (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017). Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, he now 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 event series inside a 130-foot high abandoned grain elevator.
“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.’”
—Natalie Shapero
‘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
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