Yang Mu's letters to young poets in The Completion of a Poem offer an inspirational guide to reading and writing poetry. Its comparative analysis of Chinese and Western literary traditions and poetics in general fosters a vision of world poetry.

Yang Mu, winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2013 and the Cikada Prize in 2016, started writing poetry in his teens. He has published over sixty volumes of work including poetry, creative prose essays, literary criticism, and translation.
Lisa Lai-ming Wong (Ph.D. 1999) is Associate Professor of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She has published extensively on modern poetry, including Rays of the Searching Sun: The Transcultural Poetics of Yang Mu (2009) and its Chinese translation (2015).