Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living at New York University. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She is the author of Nox; Glass, Irony and God; The Autobiography of Red; The Beauty of the Husband; Decreation; Economy of the Unlost; Eros the Bittersweet; Grief Lessons; If Not, Winter; Men in the Off Hours; and Plainwater. Sakutaro Hagiwara (1886-1942) is a seminal figure in modern Japanese literature who broke traditional poetic forms in favor of a free verse style that mixed literary and everyday diction with intense imagery, deep philosophy, and verbal distortions. Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 in Warsaw and died a prisoner in a transit camp near Vladivostock in 1938. An Acmeist poet and one who avoided the political world, he nevertheless came to be regarded as a subversive and was hounded by interrogators. In order to preserve his poetry which became incriminating if written down, poems were committed to memory by his wife, other poets, and friends. He is one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets.

Li Shangyin (813-858), the last of the great Tang poets, is renowned for his dense and cryptic lyrical imagery.