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In The Exchange, Sophie Cabot Black explores the surprising interplay between mortality and money, between the next world and this one, between the language of disease and the language of finance. Following a beloved friend through a long illness and eventual loss, these poems confront in stark emotion the aftermath, even as the outside world - the world of debts paid and collected, of power and dominion - intrudes. What is gained and what is sacrificed, and how can those profits and losses be measured when the currency involved is love?
"Starred Review. In these poems Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing." - Publishers Weekly
"Black's voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and [her poetry] is steep, precipitous and dazzling." - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Black's taut, resonant lyrics are chastened of all excess verbiage and reveal a poet of keen assurance and consummate craft, but perhaps what most amazes the reader is that such honed writing can speak with such emotional immediacy." - Boston Review
"Black is a passionate and breathlessly forceful writer ... Hers are poems which merge the erotic and the spiritual with an adamance as old as the Song of Songs, and with a prosody and lyrical richness of portraiture drawn from the Metaphysical poets and, especially, from the early Berryman." - Poetry
"Spare to the point of elegance ... [Black's] work [is] elusive but enchanting." - American Poet
This information about The Exchange was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sophie Cabot Black grew up on a small farm in New England. She has two poetry collections, The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Poetry Society of America's First Book Award and The Descent, which received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.
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