Click Here to Read: Dante and Milton, Religion and Politics: Four centuries and a thousand miles apart, each epic poet was traumatized by bloody factional strife that tore his country to pieces. One craved a worldwide monarchy. The other supported a regicide by Jamey Hecht on his Substack on January 6, 2026.
Gustav Doré, Satan Confronting Sin and Death at the Gates of Hell, c 1880. Woodcut on wove paper by Francois Pannemaker and Albert Doms. Collection of the Satanic Temple. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 
Click Here to Read: Life at Its Most Free: Tegan Bennett Daylight on not writing Ruth Park’s biography on the Sydney Review of Books website on November 7, 2025,
Ruth Park, New Zealand-born Australian author, ca. 1942, from vintage gelatin silver print, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Editor’s Note: Irene Willis, author of our Poetry Monday column for many years, died Jan. 3 of natural causes in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She was 96.
She will be greatly missed and leaves us with many fond memories. Irene had been editing her latest book, Before We Had Pockets: Uncollected Poems and Essays, which IP Books plans to publish posthumously. Here is a selection from that book, as her final contribution to Poetry Monday:
Time’s A-Wastin’
All the names I know
All the ones I’ve met –
Could any ever serve
As harbingers of regret?
Or the unblemished sense
of time without end
before it rushed on without me?
Click Here to Read All Poetry Monday posts on this website,
Click Here to Purchase: And Another Thing: poems by Irene Willis
Click Here to Purchase: Allow Me: New and Selected Poems: 1975 to 2021 by Irene Willis
Click Here to Purchase: Green Dialogue: poems by Irene Willis
Click Here to Purchase: What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration edited by Irene Willis and Jim Haba,
Click Here to Purchase: Rehearsal: Poems by Irene Willis
Click Here to Purchase: Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry Edited and With an Introduction by Irene Willis.
Click Here to View: VERBATIM: Kiran Desai on the gift of loneliness: The author of “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” on the curse and blessing of being alone, her 20-year road to making a masterpiece, and how her Indian uncles tell her to use ChatGPT on her writing by Anand Giridharadas, Kiran Desai, and Leigh Haber on the Ink Substack on December 24, 2025.
∙
Preview
