The Exchange: Poems

by Sophie Cabot Black

Overview

"Black's voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and [her poetry] is steep, precipitous and dazzling." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

* A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry *

I took care of myself. I took care
Of myself, thinking much too often

I took care of someone else.
Everything feels like payment.
—from "Pay Attention"

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555976415
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/07/2013
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sophie Cabot Black is the author of two previous poetry collections: The Descent, winner of the Connecticut Book Award, and The Misunderstanding of Nature, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She lives in New York City and in New England.

Table of Contents

Afterlife 3

I

Already Broken 7

Diagnosis 8

Biopsy 9

Chemotherapy 10

Settling 11

The Son 12

Somewhere in New Jersey is the Center 13

High Finance 14

What You Haw to Tell 15

Again the Hospital 16

When it Comes 17

Gate 18

Sheetrock 20

Real Estate 21

Private Equity 22

To Market 23

Love Poem 24

Where We Are Being What We Made 25

Summit 26

Seeking Alpha 27

Closer 28

II

Bird at a Window 31

Atheism 32

Analysis 33

Eat What You Kill 34

Enough 35

The Suit 36

Given Pornography 37

Online Again 39

Turning Away 40

Preservation of Capital 41

That Which Gathers Us in 42

Spread 43

What You Wait For 44

Finally He Speaks About Dying 46

When I Call You 47

Lucy Made a Mask in Rehab 48

Dark Harbor 49

Moving in the Almost 50

The One Turn that Makes the New World 51

Dominion Over the Larger Animal 52

Looking for Bataille 53

Statue of Victory Halfway Up the Stair 54

As Disciple 55

From Stone 56

Accident 57

Leverage 58

Getting to the End 59

Man Overboard 60

It Never Goes Away 61

You Said it Was Not 62

Bird Left Behind 63

Palms Facing Out and Away from the Body 64

I Have Talked Too Much 66

Our House 67

Pay Attention 68

Unbound 71

Editorial Reviews

You must write as if all along a flaw /Was on the bone, one place not quite right” writes Black in her third collection. These meditative, aphoristic poems deal with paying witness to illness, questioning both the future and the afterlife. The theme of “exchange”—of time, love, and knowledge—proves central to the collection’s metaphysical concerns. Poems about biopsy and chemotherapy appear alongside poems about real estate and private equity, suggesting an ominous correlation between the use and cost of the body: “To use the entire body/ Is to kneel down; her bones are the price/ Of information.” Another poem declares, “Everything feels like payment.” The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, alluded to throughout the collection, complicates the idea of exchange by introducing sacrifice: “Every time I begin with the story of a man/ Willing to kill his son. Tell me what I need/ To know.” Cabot has a gift for abstracting the familiar in an effort to recapture memory, skillfully using negation to suspend sense: “No voice/ Heard as once imagined nor did she/ Beckon and somehow know what I did not/ Know, behind her what I loved/ All the while.” In these poems Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing. (May)

Publishers Weekly

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

“These meditative, aphoristic poems deal with paying witness to illness, questioning both the future and the afterlife. . . . In these poems Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“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.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, The 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

“Accomplished. . . . 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

From the Publisher

In her accomplished third work, Norma Farber and Connecticut Books Award- winner Black follows a friend's long illness from biopsy ("He is still afraid/ And so I lie down first") to inevitable loss ("There is/ The window. Open. Now go through"). The poems weaving through the rest of this surely voiced collection contrast a melancholic sense of what will be missed ("The meadows you meant to walk all year,/ That part of the woods you've never been") with focused moments when the violence, the sheer physicality of dying, punch through. "You must write as if all along a flaw/ Was on the bone" says the opening poem, only apparently about an injured horse; later, we learn about the "unimaginable heat" of chemotherapy: "My friend is going through the fire on his knees." VERDICT 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.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal