With The Glass Globe, celebrated poet Margaret Gibson completes a trilogy distinguished by its meditative focus on the author’s experience of her late husband’s Alzheimer’s disease. In this new collection, she blends elegies of personal bereavement with elegies for the earth during the ongoing global crisis wrought by climate change. Gibson’s poems personalize the vastness of climate catastrophe while simultaneously enlarging personal grief beyond the limits of self-absorption. A work of great compassion and vision, The Glass Globe is a necessary, heartbreaking book from one of our most compelling poets.

"For over 40 years, Margaret Gibson's poetry has explored intimate human relationships in the natural and social worlds we inhabit. In her thirteenth volume of poems, Gibson continues to see herself and her world with clarity and awareness, but now with perhaps greater urgency. These poems grieve deeply, even as they warn and celebrate, with elegies for the beloved and elegies for the earth during the impending global crisis wrought by climate change. "The Glass Globe" begins with a moving poem which recounts washing the beloved's body just after death, and it concludes with a poem that "washes" the body of the earth, "this only, and only once, for once and for all / earth, as if it were a lover who has died." The book follows a dialectic pattern: the first section of open-hearted personal loss and lament moves to a second section of poems that explore environmental crisis, followed by a third section in which the vastness of climatic catastrophe and the intimacy of personal bereavement merge and reflect each other"--