Europe’s old myths collide with bureaucracy, migration, desire, and a watchful dog.

In poems that travel from Jerusalem and Rome to German offices, provincial streets, border zones, and private rooms, Nora Bossong tests the inherited languages of faith, empire, and belonging against the compromised present. Saints, crusaders, tourists, civil servants, lovers, and animals enter the same unsettled field. The poems move quickly between documentary detail and metamorphosis, finding pressure points where public history becomes bodily and intimate.

Crusade with Dog is politically attentive without becoming programmatic. Bossong’s lines are cool, exact, and unexpectedly tender; their formal control makes room for irony, embarrassment, violence, and wonder. Europe appears as both idea and lived terrain, burdened by colonial and religious memory while continually remade by movement across its borders. The dog of the title is a companion and a comic counterweight—a creature that sniffs out what abstraction conceals. These poems ask who is permitted to arrive, who must explain themselves, and what lyric language can still rescue from the categories of the state.