Tsvetaeva's final collection before she returned to the Soviet Union, where her husband was shot and her daughter sent to the camps, and where she eventually hanged herself. The poems are violently linguistic: compressed, syntactically shattered, metrically unpredictable, as if the language itself were breaking under the pressure of exile and love. Joseph Brodsky called her the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, above Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Mandelstam.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.