"Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen has offered a compelling study of the position of Buddhism within Shinkei's poetics. Building on her great project of studying the life and writings of Shinkei, she has given us a window into a world where the lines between religion and artistic practice were blurred—and, in the case of Shinkei, ultimately disappeared. Ramirez-Christensen's study is an important contribution to comparative poetics and to the ongoing discussions of the subtle relationship between religion and the arts in the medieval world."—Brian Ruppert, Journal of Japanese Studies "[Emptiness and Temporality] is an example of impeccable scholarship by an author with a through knowledge of source materials and a broad, interdisciplinary theoretical background, scholarship that is beautifully supplemented by deep and precise reading of poems in excellent translation."—Rein Raud, Monumenta Nipponica "The most notable contribution Ramirez-Christensen makes for western audiences is her introduction and illumination of renga verses as an expression of Buddhist awakening . . . She offers readers a much-needed study in Japanese literature, examining what can be a rather inaccessible poetic form with great skill and clarity."—Victor J. Forte, H-Net Reviews "In addition to her groundbreaking Emptiness and Temporality, which itself constitutes a major contribution to the fields of waka and renga studies, she has published a 416 page annotated translation of the poet Shinkei's fifteenth-century Sasamegoto, Murmured Conversations (2008) . . . These two new volumes confirm their author as one the world's leading authorities on Shinkei, renga, and medieval Japanese poetics."—Japanese Journal of Religious Studies