The Exchange

“These meditative, aphoristic poems deal with paying witness to illness, questioning both the future and the afterlife. . . . Cabot has a gift for abstracting the familiar in an effort to recapture memory, skillfully using negation to suspend sense….In these poems Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review, PW pick

“The Exchange: The Book For You. [Black is] a poet’s poet, admired and widely read among her peers… take it with you on a bus, to a hospital, to wait in line at a bank. You could take The Exchange nearly anywhere and have it speak to you. . . . These poems remind us of the ways we each pass through the stations of a life. In doing this, they capture the wonder of trying to inhabit life’s shapes at all. . . . With precision, Black’s poems skirt great mysteries.”
—Tess Taylor, NPR, “All Things Considered”

“Black’s writing is distinguished by its control and lack of extravagance; we experience the pain, the loss, the moment when her friend acknowledges that he is dying as quietly illuminating moments, and all the better for it. A lovely work for many readers; surely even those who don’t typically read poetry will find understanding here.”
—Library Journal

“[Sophie Cabot Black has] concocted a way of speaking in poetry that’s very fresh and daring.”
—Billy Collins, The New York Times

“The poems in The Exchange . . . are emphatically alive. This fierce energy breathes life back into the hopeless soul. . . . The Exchange is Sophie Cabot Black’s best and most eloquent book to date.”
—Huffington Post

“Black has received praise for her taut lyrics of elusive yet enchanting elegance. [The Exchange] continues that trend, and here Black confronts various forms of trade and exchange, from stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, to life for death, to a child for the sacrificial lamb.”
—Booklist

“This austere collection of verse . . . is a poised exploration of the confluence of money, illness, sexuality, power, and sacrifice. . . . The Exchange has a polish that belies the intensity and intellectual ambition of its poetic concerns. . . . an impressive feat of imaginative energy.”
—The L Magazine

“Cabot Black breaks the code of the world of finance by holding it against crucial debts of love and pain. . . . if I may intrude on the author’s metonymy [The Exchange] is credit-worthy.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“…Black offers neither redemption nor revelation. Instead she provides a tough, unrelenting vision…gives philosophy, allusion and imagery in a highly charged, highly condensed orality.”
—Rain Taxi

“The Exchange is a poignant, graceful, and often surprising collection from one of our most important poetic voices.”
—Collected Works

“…Black is, it seems to me, the great contemporary poet of the psychology of myth. [In The Exchange] Black uses these sonnet-like forms brilliantly, in-formatively. She knows that grief twists syntax (few poets these days use line-breaks better than Black does)… These are essential poems, and essentially wise as they enact their meditative discoveries.”
—Jacket2

“…Black crafts a cohesive collection of tightly woven, ruthlessly examining poems…The Exchange merits attention for the way it approaches deeply difficult subjects honestly, with a keen eye for the truth.”
—New Pages