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

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?