Monahan has a Ph.D. in English. She teaches at Wayne State University and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In this essay, Monahan explores how Dennis's poem uses reverie as a way of talking about free will and determinism.

In "The God Who Loves You," Dennis indirectly addresses issues of free will and determinism as he explores a real estate agent's daydream. In this the final poem of his Pulitzer Prize—winning collection, Practical Gods, Dennis uses the agent's habitual Friday night drive home as the occasion for the agent's self-evaluative reverie. On a given Friday night, the agent assesses himself positively because he has had three sales. At the same time, the agent imagines a loving, omniscient (all-knowing), and anthropomorphic (humanized) god who is troubled because the god can see the unfulfilled potential that would have come to this man had he made...