On a frigid winter's night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding. In his hands he clutches a box he has found there. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected college professor and serial adulterer, whose last affair has left his career in ruins. She is Beulah Limosneros, one of his students and for a brief time his lover. She had disappeared into Mexico two years earlier, following her obsession with Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, who was born in 1648, entered a convent at age nineteen, and became the greatest poet of her time, only to die of plague in 1695. As a police investigation closes in around Gregory, he examines the box's contents, fearful of incriminating evidence Beulah may have against himtranslated poems of Sor Juana, a travel journal, research notes on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Inquisition, diary entries concerning him, and a strange manuscript about Sor Juana. Based on the life of one of literature's most compelling figures, Paul Anderson's astonishing debut unveils a great poet's withdrawal from the world who at the height of her creative powers signs a vow of contrition in her own blood.