Bøker av Ed Falco

From discursive essay-poems to tightly constructed lyrics, Ed Falco's X in the Tickseed examines a world that reveals itself through its mysteries, reflecting upon the ephemeral nature of all things. In the series of poems that bookend the collection, a speaker identified only as X reviews personal history and relationships, speculating, pondering, and questioning in the face of a baffling universe. Peppered between the X poems, artists as varied as Artemisia Gentileschi, Frank O'Connor, and Nick Cave surface, usually in poems posing as essays about their art. Other poems range from explorations of cultural perspective, as in "A Few Words to a Young American Killed in the Tet Offensive," where a war resister addresses a young man of his generation who died in Vietnam, to the often playful "An Alphabet of Things." Throughout, Falco's poems speculate on matters of life and faith, intensified by an awareness of death.

Ed Falco considers love and the loss of love, what we have today and what we remember of yesterday, the promise of youth and the disappointments and pleasures of aging. By turns whimsical, meditative, and poignant, these poems examine the joys and sorrows of living.