The Looking Glass: Far and Near is poetry that searches voices in the cities of a divided America faced with an unraveling democracy and across borders where people negotiating the fragility of life offer a vision of transcendence through recovery of our common humanity. The leaps of imagination expressed in each poem reflect on issues such as COVID-19, lethal police violence, criminalized kids, school mass shootings, asylum seekers, race relations, reckless politics, and the contributions of overlooked human beings to the ongoing process of defining national values such as freedom, justice, and equality. The collection is a contribution to the artistic expression of our time with its polarization and social upheaval, and it freshly illuminates the ways rejected human beings use their agency to lurch toward justice and give voice to the possibilities of regard for all human beings.