The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry, Legacy Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 3-18 Sarasvati Award, Robert Fitzgerald Award, Yale Younger Poets Finalist, National Poetry Series Finalist, Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Shortlist An accepting space for all who identify as women or gender-nonconforming, and a kind, re-membering space where truthful, challenging conversations safely hark to the Second Law of Witchcraft: “always assume the other person is doing their best”

Finch's dramatic works of poetry include The Encyclopedia of Scotland (1983), originally performed in a libretto version with live music, as well as Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press, 2010) and Wolf Song, which premiered at Portland, Maine's Mayo Street Arts in 2012. Both plays were collaborative productions incorporating music, dance, puppets, and masks. Finch has also written and performed several works in a genre she calls "poetry ritual theater," combining multimedia poetry performance with interactive audience ritual; these including "Five Directions," premiered at Mayo Street Arts, Portland, Maine, in 2012, directed by Alzenira Quezada, and "Winter Solstice Dreams," premiered at Deepak Homebase, New York, in 2018, directed by Vera Beren. [31] [32] Composers who have set Finch's poems to music include Stefania de Kennessey, Matthew Harris, and Dale Trumbore. Trumbore's settings of the poems have won the Yale Glee Club Emerging Composers Award, the Gregg Smith Choral Composition Contest, and other awards. [33] [34] [35] [36] Finch was invited by composer Deborah Drattell to write the libretto for the opera Marina, based on the life of poet Marina Tsvetaeva. it was produced by American Opera Projects in 2003, directed by Anne Bogart, and sung by Lauren Flanigan. [37] Prosody and literary criticism [ edit ] Meter," "moon," "mother," and "magic" all come from the same root; based on Annie's lifetime of experience, Meter Magic Spiral is meter as it is meant to be learned! Of Alive, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote, “Willis has been enthralling, challenging, and frustrating the poetry cognoscenti with hermetic, allusive, scholarly, and startlingly opaque verse and prose since the early 1990s.… Willis also stands out for the many various ways she uses sources from the visual arts, incorporating Ruskin, Giorgione, J.M.W. Turner, Joseph Cornell, and William Blake. Willis’s challenging, cerebral work rewards the patient reader.”

Finch, Henry Leroy, Henry Leroy Finch Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College All We Need (SATB Choir) - Text by Annie Finch, Music by Dale Trumbore". Archived from the original on 2021-12-12 . Retrieved Oct 26, 2019– via www.youtube.com. Finch's dedication to writing in meter and her role as a scholar, editor, and critic of poetic form led some reviewers of her first books to classify her poetry within the movement known as New Formalism. Dictionary of Literary Biography named her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetry" for her role in the reclamation of poetic form. [12] But reviewers soon noticed key differences between Finch's poetry and that of other new formalist poets. Henry Taylor, for example, claimed that Finch was not a typical new formalist because she did not focus on the realities of contemporary life, [13] and C.L. Rawlins emphasized the incantatory use of form in Eve, writing, "Finch is a poet in her bones . . . . What she proves in Eve is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, but a bioacoustic key to memory and emotion." [14] Cindy Williams Gutierrez made a similar point in a review of a later book: “Finch is more shaman than formalist. She is keenly aware of the shape and sound of her poems. Whether in a chant, sonnet, ghazal, or even Billy Collins’ contrived paradelle, her skill is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.” [15]

Foundation, Poetry (Oct 25, 2019). "Occasioning Poetry by Annie Finch". Poetry Foundation . Retrieved Oct 26, 2019.In the opening of the fearless, transgressive poetry collection WITCH, readers are greeted with a “penis hex”. Later there are “spells” for exile, for online porn, for UN resolutions, all written in a voice that is radical in its freedom, evoking sensual imagery of earth, blood, sex and body as a way of unravelling femininity and its history. Tamás explores how an affinity with nature and a talent for herbal remedies were cast as something dark and evil, and how women resisted. In the poem “WITCH TRIALS”, we catch a glimpse of what underpins the desire, or need, for magic: “the witch tries to think about how it started /maybe it was when a girl came home late at / night with half her clothes missing / maybe it was when the witch made beds in the cellar / for everyone coming to abort their unwanted babies.” At their best, witches are symbols of resistance against patriarchy and the harnessing of feminine power With Samhain around the corner, here are four poems written by women to celebrate the witch. Read “The Witch” by Elizabeth Willis , “Witch-Wife” by Edna St. Vincent Millay , or “After He Called Her a Witch” by Susan Ludvigson if you wish to explore other poems. Finch, Annie. The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 13-30

Finch's first poetry collection, Eve (Story Line Press, 1997), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Calendars ( Tupelo Press, 2003), finalist for the National Poetry Series and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Book of the Year award, is structured around a series of poems written for performance to celebrate the Wheel of the Year. [8] Her third book, Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams ( Red Hen Press, 2010), which received the Sarasvati Award for Poetry, is a hybrid work combining narrative and dramatic structure to tell a mythic story about abortion. The Encyclopedia of Scotland was published in 2010 by Salt Publishing in the U.K.; [9] in the same year, Carnegie Mellon University Press reissued Eve in the Contemporary Classics Poetry Series. Spells: New and Selected Poems ( Wesleyan University Press, 2012), collects poems from each of Finch's previous books along with previously unpublished poems. The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (2019), also from Wesleyan University Press, offers small spells of fewer than eight lines, gathered by Finch from the longer poems of Spells. Bahuguna, Urvashi (15 October 2018). "Before India's #MeToo, a poetry anthology replaced its editor after allegations of sexual misconduct". Scroll.in . Retrieved Oct 26, 2019.Now write an acrostic poem about a potion. Perhaps it could be a rhyming spell. Think about what ingredients might go into your potion and the sounds it makes as it bubbles away. For example, does it fizz, spit, pop or bang? Think about what power your potion has. Finch is the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020) as well as nine anthologies of poetic craft. Her other books on In the preface to Spells: New and Selected Poems (2013), Finch writes, "Compiling this book has led me to appreciate how much I was inspired as a poet by coming of age during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Reading it has helped me understand the ways I struggled over the years to throw off the burden of misogyny on my spiritual, psychological, intellectual, political, and poetic identities. My themes are often female-centered . . . I am proud to define myself as a woman poet." [19] Annie Finchis a poet, translator, cultural critic, and performance artist. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Earth Days: Poems, Chants, and Spells in Five Directions (Nirala Publications, 2023); Eve (Story Line Press, 1997) and Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), both finalists for the National Poetry Series; Spells: New and Selected Poems and The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (2019) from Wesleyan University Press;and the verse play Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press, 2010), winner of the Saraswati Award. Finch’s work has appeared in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011) and The Norton Anthology of World Literature and has been translated into eight languages. An engagingly inventive pamphlet bringing the Pendle story to life through innovative language, which dazzles and enthrals. Poems attuned at once to the rhythms and limits of language. ‘ – Judges for the 2016 Michael Marks Awards

of disconnected pleasure still it has worked out something intimate about your weak dark inside region

I felt drawn to them because I felt that they hadn’t quite been done justice in literature before. They have been ‘covered’, but somehow it didn’t seem angry enough. When Miller wrote The Crucible (1953), that was angry. But I felt there was nothing said about the Pendle Witches in the UK that was comparable.’– Camille Ralphs in conversation with Shoshana Kessler for the London Magazine Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work. With Johanna Keller and Candace McClelland. CavanKerry Press, 2000. Calendars(2003), Among the Goddesses(2010), Spells: New and Selected Poems(2013), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion(2020) Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. With Maxine Kumin and Deborah Brown. University of Arkansas Press, 2005.