Dear Dante: Poems

In the summer of 2021, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell honored the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, by embarking on a three-month pilgrimage through the 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy, reading one canto per day. This new collection, Dear Dante, is her response to Dante's epic poem: 39 poems (13 for each of the 3 canticles), plus an additional 3 to serve as prologue and epilogue, all written in the poetic forms Dante loved best: the sonnet and the form he invented, terza rima.

In O'Donnell's words: "Dear Dante is a species of accompaniment, an act of homage, and a long love letter to Dante. It might also be read as a series of meditations that attest to how dear Dante is to us. The Commedia is our inheritance, a gift granted to readers by our brother poet 700 years ago. These poems are an admittedly small expression of gratitude for that grand and graced gift. Grazie Mille, Maestro."