This was, for obvious reasons, my Sunday reading.
Slavitt's translation is brilliant because he actually does the alphabetical acrostic in English and it doesn't look like a child's second grade assignment.
The focus on finding the right word messes with the sentence structure just enough to defamiliarize and makes me focus on the content of the words. Because Slavitt so often begins with an adjective or adverb to get the acrostic right, each verse is emotionally colored in a way that draws attention not to the object, but to the experience.
The other thing that marked this translation for me was Slavitt's obvious discomfort with a God whose behavior is justified and so he often translates statements that, in Hebrew, are ambiguous in their tone, as obvious questions in English. How can God allow this to happen? Can this be justice rather than this is justice.
It's a valuable interpretive move and intersects interestingly with R. Ruti Regan's Eicha live tweets.
The meditations at the beginning were not precisely new to me, but Slavitt's use of history as poetry (which, as they say, does not repeat itself but does rhyme) was also a kind of defamiliarization with the historical events that Eicha and the kinot commemorate. It seems strange to consider that the authors of these texts didn't always think about a world where their tragedies were unknown and required context. Slavitt's meditations, with their careful citations and their open-ended questions, provide the context for the day.