"...pulses with the blood of earth and stone. Through a lens of geography and geology, Barba looks at time, and our human efforts -- sometimes futile, sometimes hopeful, sometimes cruel -- to make sense of forces much larger and much older than our selves. It asks how we can understand eternity, and how we can be in gentle relation to this earth that we inhabit. In the collection's incantatory centerpiece, about saving the Colorado River, she gives a catalog of species potentially endangered or displaced, repeating 'stay with me now' as the list goes on. Keep listening, she seems to urge, we're all in this together."--Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe Susan Barba's new collection of poems resembles the spheroid stone of its name; when cracked open, a glittering and fascinating crystalline structure is revealed but the stony sphere she offers us, and the beauty within, is nothing less than the earth. With anguish and praise, in the spirit of both the ode and the elegy, Barba considers our time within the larger scale of deep-time. The species decreasing in number and disappeared and the possibility of human extinction haunt this book, while new generations and the possibility of renunciation of our old ways animate it. Here is the world, Barba reminds us, like a ball, in our hands.