

Noah Falck (photo by Marcus Jackson)
Noah Falck (photo by Marcus Jackson)
Noah Falck, a Buffalo-based poet whose writing combines vivid imagery with the surreal to defamiliarize the familiar and create new emotional landscapes for the reader to navigate and discover, will conduct a craft talk and poetry reading as part of the Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series.
The writers series, which is funded through the Fredonia College Foundation, has transitioned to a virtual format this fall at Fredonia.
The craft talk will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 23, and the poetry reading on Thursday, Sept. 24, both at 7 p.m. The sessions will be recorded for those who cannot attend a virtual session. Registration links are Craft Talk Zoom registration and Poetry Reading Zoom registration.
Selections from Mr. Falck鈥檚 just release book, 鈥淓xclusions,鈥 will be read. Falck鈥檚 role as education director of Just Buffalo Literary Center and running the Silo City Reading Series, which brings together local poets, nationally recognized writers and Buffalo-area musicians in an abandoned grain silo, will be shared by him in the craft talk.
鈥淔alck will talk about his experiences and the importance of building community 鈥 between poets, between artists of different disciplines and between the arts and cities,鈥 said Department of English Assistant Professor Michael Sheehan.
Each poem of Falck imagines the world that remains after the subject of the poem has been excluded, Mr. Sheehan noted.
鈥淭hese are at times banal 鈥 parking meters, the metric system, birthdays 鈥 and at other times seemingly more consequential 鈥 war, cancer, death,鈥 Sheehan said. 鈥淭he reader can consider the excluded idea as the absent center of each poem or see each poem as a possibility space where anything can be included except the one identified subject.鈥
Natalie Shapero, author of 鈥淗ard Child,鈥 says 鈥淓xclusions鈥 purports to leave everything out, and yet somehow manages to have everything in it: birth, death, rust, sex, smoking, shadows, floodlights and Olympic mascots. 鈥淔alck is a deadpan Nostradamus, dispensing fast-hitting predictions and sour flashes of the past,鈥 Ms. Shapero said.
鈥淭hese 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,鈥 Shapero added.
Falck also wrote 鈥淪nowmen Losing Weight鈥 as well as several chapbooks that include 鈥淵ou Are in Nearly Every Future鈥 and 鈥淐elebrity Dream Poems.鈥 He co-edited the anthology 鈥淢y Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry鈥 and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Ohio State University and Antioch Writers鈥 Workshop.
His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, conduit, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and Poets.org and has been anthologized in 鈥淧oem-A-day 365: Poems for Every Occasion,鈥 released by the Academy of American Poets. He formerly taught in elementary school and currently spends summers mentoring young writers as a faculty member in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop.