In "Little World," for example, he discovers, on a snowy day, cozy in his tiny apartment, that the little blow-up globe he's suspended in front of his window displays funny mistakes in spelling and geography - "Shrereport" for Shreveport, Chicago out of place, cities in Texas mixed up - but his initial delight at the prospect of going over the whole mixed-up, made-in-Honk Kong globe turns grim when he imagines the sweatshop child laborers who made those mistakes. Similarly his chagrin at having to cool his heels in the hallway while interviewers for the college teaching job (which he's flown across the country at his own expense to seek) laugh and joke in their luxury suite with their first-choice candidate is transformed into a much wider perspective on envy and misery with his encounter with desperate, homeless people on the street outside. In poem after poem in this collection, the big world impinges on the little world, forcing the author - self-involved, anxious "not to get involved" - to look up from his shoe tops, and say, as honestly as he can, what he sees.