Brown's Pulitzer-winning collection invents the "duplex" — a fourteen-line form that braids the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues, each couplet swallowing the line before it. Across poems of desire, illness, family, and the Black body in a violent America, the pastoral keeps turning elegiac: the title poem catalogs flower names before ending on the names of the dead. Tenderness and terror share the same breath.

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