Howe's elegy for her brother John, who died of AIDS complications, is the most intimate and formally plain collection of elegies since Hardy's. Where confessional poetry often uses grief to perform the self, Howe's poems are so specific (a pair of gloves, a grocery list, the particular way John held his fork) that they dissolve the self into loss and back again. The title poem is among the most beloved contemporary American poems.

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