Justice dedicated "Incident in a Rose Garden" to poet, friend, former student, and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Mark Strand. Like Justice, Strand frequently writes about the absence of the self and the sadness of human life. His Selected Poems (1979) is a good introduction to his work.

Philip Ziegler's The Black Death (1998) details the plague that gripped Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Ziegler notes that plague probably cost Europe between 12.5 and 70 percent of its population according to region, population density, hygiene, and other factors.

Justice's New and Selected Poems (1997) updates his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 Selected Poems by changing the previous volume's selection and adding many poems written in the intervening fifteen years.