Kyger's Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964 (2000) is a journal of her stay in Japan as well as her four-month visit to India in early 1962, when she was a young poet married to Gary Snyder. In these years, Kyger was developing her poetic sensibility and her Buddhist practice, which would become central to her life.

Philip Whalen, who wrote Overtime: Selected Poems (1999), was a leading member of the San Francisco Renaissance and a friend and mentor of Kyger's, as well as friend of Snyder, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. He later became a Buddhist monk and was appointed dharma sangha (head monk) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1984. Whalen belonged to no poetic school, and his work differed from those of the Beats. It is known for its reverence for the mundane world, sense of humor often turned on...