The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells

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Poet and critic Ron Silliman has situated Finch in the context of experimental poetry, writing, "Annie Finch can't be a new formalist, precisely because she's passionate both about the new and about form. She is also one of the great risk-takers in contemporary poetry, right up there with Lee Ann Brown& Bernadette Mayer in her willingness to completely shatter our expectations as readers." [16] The experimental aspect of Finch's work became more evident with the publication of Spells, which includes 35 of the poems composed in the 1980s that she refers to as the "lost poems." In the preface to Spells, she describes these as "metrical and experimental poems [that]. . . did not find their audience until the avant-garde's rediscovery of formal poetic strategies just a few years ago." [17] Annie Finch (born October 31, 1956) is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet's Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses. Early life and education [ edit ]

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Poems ( Wesleyan University Press, 2012), collects poems from each of Finch's previous books along with previously unpublished poems.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. A learning community where women and gender nonconforming people can learn the magic of meter . . . and participate in discussions and supportive community around poetry, meter, rhythm, scansion, and/or magic, ritual, self-transformation.What impresses me about Malkin and its style, compared to related areas of the avant-garde, is the subtlety of the conceits. Much experimental writing ends up being just that – clinical, something by which difference alone is measured. Ralphs transcends this. […] She has a pure instinct for her own style, while drawing capably on a gritty, serious atmosphere that is the birthright of certain English poets from Gawain to Hughes; a kind of wit we associate more with Donne; a tenderness found in Rossetti’s lyrics. There is something lasting about the poems.’ – Tom Cook, Partisan

for investigation for intersection for fence for phallus for trunk for the thing the thing the thing one solar Camille Ralphs’ Malkin is a vivid collection of poems about the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. Illustrated with woodcut-style drawings by Emma Wright. Shortlisted for the 2016 Michael Marks Award.

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The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. Poets on Poetry Series, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.