Buffalo poet to conduct virtual craft talk, reading

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’s just release book, “Exclusions,” will be read. Falck’s 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.

“Falck will talk about his experiences and the importance of building community – between poets, between artists of different disciplines and between the arts and cities,” 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.

“These are at times banal – parking meters, the metric system, birthdays – and at other times seemingly more consequential – war, cancer, death,” Sheehan said. “The 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.”

Natalie Shapero, author of “Hard Child,” says “Exclusions” purports to leave everything out, and yet somehow manages to have everything in it: birth, death, rust, sex, smoking, shadows, floodlights and Olympic mascots. “Falck is a deadpan Nostradamus, dispensing fast-hitting predictions and sour flashes of the past,” Ms. Shapero said.

“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,” Shapero added.

Falck also wrote “Snowmen Losing Weight” as well as several chapbooks that include “You Are in Nearly Every Future” and “Celebrity Dream Poems.” He co-edited the anthology “My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry” and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Ohio State University and Antioch Writers’ Workshop.

His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, conduit, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and Poets.org and has been anthologized in “Poem-A-day 365: Poems for Every Occasion,” 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.