Most of the poems in An Opening in the Vertical World emerge from travel, with vivid evocations growing more meditative as the book proceeds. Encounters with music or visual art appear throughout, and the book closes with a poem inspired by modern dance.

Roger Greenwald attended The City College of New York and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. He has published three earlier books of poems: Connecting Flight, Slow Mountain Train and The Half-Life. He won the 2018 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award from Exile Magazine.

Greenwald won the CBC Poetry Prize in 1994 and First Prize in the CBC Literary Award for Travel Literature in 2003.