Nakahara Chūya (1907–1937) was one of the finest Japanese poets of the twentieth century. Often referred to as the Japanese Rimbaud for his tragic early death and poems of ennui and romantic melancholy, he was a pioneer of modernism in Japanese poetry and published two collections in his lifetime, Songs of the Goat and Songs of Days That Were.

Jeffrey Angles (editor/translator) is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. He has won awards for his translations from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation, the Modern Language Association, the PEN American Center, and the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Studies at Columbia University. His own book of Japanese poetry was a finalist for the Nakahara Chūya Prize and won the Yomiuri Prize.