Uniting all of Annie Finch ’s poetry, as well as her musical collaborations, editing, translation, and criticism, is a conception of poetry as physical:  rooted deeply in its traditions across centuries and cultures, and at the same time grounded in the present, incantatory, performative, speaking to the body as much as to the mind. The forms of her poems are based in Multiformalism (the name of an anthology she coedited with Susan Schultz) and the themes of many of her poems focus on nature and the spirit.

"Finch focuses on the cyclical and seasonal, centering on themes of birth, death, family and artistic lineage, sexuality and female spirituality. . . Finch almost always draws one in with an unnerving and utterly unexpected phrase or image, as when addressing "The Moon": "Then you are the dense everywhere that moves,/ the dark matter they haven't yet walked through?" Such moments seem to contain the full duration of this book's calendars."

—Publishers Weekly

"Annie Finch understands better than any contemporary I know what poetry feels like and sounds like when it is completely at home in its traditions. . .  ..   She is a major poet, one of very few who understand how lyric lives in part because it can speak for something larger than the ego."

—Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

“Annie Finch is an American original, a master of control who shows no fear of excess, and none of quietness either. With a perfect-pitch ear for the American tongue, she is a formalist as much in the tradition of Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer as of Hart Crane and John Berryman. Calendars is a marvelous book, filled with poems whose directness and simplicity are deceptive – they have depths and delights that appear to go on forever.” ­ —Ron Silliman

"Annie Finch's poems are life-enhancing, sensuous, and pristine in one breath, the sexiest work I've read by a contemporary poet. Her poetry resembles Auden's in intellectual brilliance but she gratefully lack his cynicism. At best, her poetry is filled with a humility born not of a self crushed, but rather through the realization of the absolute fragility of the moment."
- Michael Maglaras

“Mesmerizing and original, Finch occupies a unique place in American poetry: no one writing today so playfully and intelligently combines lyric and ritual.”— ­ Molly Peacock

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Copyright©2006 Annie Finch