What the Living Do
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.
Howe's plainness is both the method and the gamble: many of these poems are prose memories with line breaks, and if the flat declarative line does not transmit for you, there is nothing behind it to fall back on. One subject, one register. Grief carries the book; audible craft mostly waits outside.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
