Anna Key used Italian Renaissance poet Vittoria Colonna's Sonnets for Michelangelo as a spiritual exercise and foundation for the sonnets in After Colonna. Key tried to find within herself, sonnet for sonnet, the spiritual movement that gave rise to each poem and then to write from that place, to feel the urgency and the difficulty of it.

Reaching across a vast range of human experience and struggling humbly, inch by inch, toward the true sun that illuminates our days, Key's re-imaginings of Colonna's "Sonnets" bring Colonna's spiritual searching into the 21st century, re-investing the devotional sonnet with contemporary energy in poems that that are as fresh and clear as they are deep and searching.