Alden Nowlan’s poem “An Exchange Of Gifts” is about literature; how a person can read the same text twenty times and still have a different experience every time they read it. Each time we read a story, our visualizations and understanding changes. Each time we read something. we pick up on details we missed the first read through. Our backgrounds, experiences and when we read the text can all play a factor in how we imagine a text. My understanding and interpretation of this poem, reading it one time through was more concrete than the last time I read it. The title “An Exchange of Gifts” correlates with the meaning of the poem because the ‘exchange’ refers to the writer giving gifts to the one reading and the ‘gifts’ are their writings