Exclusions

Natalie Shapero writes, “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.”