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A murder mystery can provide sharp social commentary—and great fun.

—έαυτον εκέωωσεν

At the United Church of Santa Fe, a small bulto of Mary sits on a stand near the entrance to the sanctuary. The carved wooden statue is by self-taught New Mexico artists Doreen and Ronald Martinez, who work in the Spanish arts tradition. Their bulto is a centerpiece work in a collection of art from local Pueblo and tribal communities.

Twenty-six jet-lagged college students
arrive in Freiburg, Germany,
starting their semester abroad.
On their first day they tour the Altstadt
under a low, cold winter sun.
Around a great Gothic cathedral
is a wide cobbled Münsterplatz
where they try out their classroom German—
Ich möchte Mittagessen kaufen—
for bratwurst from a food-truck grill.

“Dante, though Virgil’s leaving you, do not
yet weep, do not weep yet; you’ll need your tears
for what another sword must yet inflict.”

                               . . .

“Look here! For I am Beatrice, I am!”
—Purgatorio, 30:55–57, 73

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
—Romeo and Juliet

Cars waver down the glassy streets,
somebody in a pickup scrapes the parking lot.
Nobody trusts anybody to stop for the signs.
Every cough, mine or yours, might tip us off
the edge of the world. Still, geese rattle over
in their honky skeins, and the mallards
paddle sweetly on the quarry, clump down
the frozen creek. The famous white duck
with the bad wing is fatter than ever.
I shoveled my long driveway twice, grumpy,
leaving scraps of snow like words snapped free
from a broken sonnet. This will all melt,

Katherine Rundell’s biography offers something new: she matches the poet’s energy with her own.