Damon McLaughlin • Exchanging Lives

In Exchanging Lives, Damon McLaughlin names litanies of fliers and swimmers: birds (crow, hawk, hummingbird, sparrow); insects (blowfly, firefly, moth, mosquito); fish (bluegill, herring, sardine, steelhead). Full of startling images, these poems invoke those creatures that dip and rise to confront “the vortex of change,” always offering—like a “butterfly [that] lift[s] delicacy from its caterpillar body”—a potential for salvation.
   • Vince Gotera - Editor, North American Review

“What rushed into us changed us,” “What illuminates disintegrates simultaneously”: These are the themes continually tested in Damon McLaughlin’s book, in poems sung with the slow cadences of the blues, set in the natural world & infused with metaphors so sensual & evocative they create their own metaphysics. The people who inhabit these tender, sometimes humorous anecdotes float in that momentary limbo where change is dangerous, possible, and necessary: a couple makes love on a precipice, two boys play at suicide and come out of the river “like retired ghosts” and a goofy man sits on a bench trying to decide whether he’s in love or not, and with whom. And lest I forget, a moth is saved because a sparrow does a tap dance and opens its mouth to sing, and a beetle lugs another beetle home for lunch.
   • Steve Orlen - Editor, The Elephant’s Child: Selected Poems, 1978-2005