“So, a poem excluding politics, excluding mathematics, excluding death. “The premise of it was writing an idea or an object or a person out of a poem,” Falck told me in 2018, in an interview for Rain Taxi, more than two years before the book would be released. “How isn’t the weather?” Falck begins in “Poem Excluding Small Talk”-deftly turning inside-out the way we think about what we live inside, and what lives inside us. Įach poem in Exclusions works by absenting what the title names.
This is “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. More to the point, they almost never attempt. But the poems in Exclusions never capture, and they never persuade. Single words or two-word phrases, the entries range from the epic and abstract-Fiction, War, Future, Sound-to the contemporary everyday-Pilates, Guyliner, Online Dating.Īs titles, the words evoke the confidence of odes and essays, or perhaps a John Ruskin lecture, attempts to capture the essence of something or persuade the reader of its inherent characteristics. The table of contents for Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020), the poet Noah Falck’s second full-length collection following 2012’s Snowmen Losing Weight, has all the implacable mystery of a scrap list you come across looking for a pair of scissors or a Band-Aid in someone else’s junk drawer.
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