Carolyn Forché initially published "The Garden Shukkei-en" in Provincetown Arts in 1988 and included it in her third collection, The Angel of History (1994). The poem was also shown in conjunction with Danz Macabre photographic art exhibit at the School of Art, Arizona State University at Tempe and is included in the portfolio of show photographs, So to Speak . Forché takes the title and epigraph of The Angel of History from Walter Benjamin's essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In haunting disembodied voices, the poems in the collection detail the atrocities of various twentieth-century horrors such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. In "The Garden Shukkei-en," which appears towards the end of the collection, a Japanese woman who survived the bombing recounts the horrors of that time and how it has come to shape the ways in which she remembers the past and interacts with the world.

Known as a strolling garden, Shukkei-en is dotted with islets of various sizes and surrounded by a range of hillocks on its north shore. The name "Shukkei-en" means "the Garden of Condensed Scenic Beauty." It was heavily damaged when the Enola Gay, an American Boeing B-29 bomber, dropped an atomic bomb dubbed "Little Boy" on Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945. The survivor in the poem remembers the death and destruction she witnessed during the bombing. Primarily a descriptive poem, "The Garden Shukkei-en" uses two voices, the Japanese survivor's and a woman who accompanies her, to structure the poem.