This book is a treasure, a gift, and a long-overdue shining of light in the most secret, sometimes painful, and often defiant lives of women. I am grateful that this anthology finally exists.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author, Eat, Pray, Love
The poems, essays, and stories in Choice Words prove that women’s bodies cannot be nationalized.
Gloria Steinem
A powerful collection of poems, fiction, and essays on the reality of abortion. . . Finch (Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, 2015, etc.) has drawn together writers across time (from the 16th century to the present), place, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and culture who offer stark, often wrenching revelations. . . Eloquent contributions to the literature on a deeply contested issue.
Kirkus, starred review
Choice Words is an important contribution to our movement for abortion access. It’s time to read what literary voices have been saying about abortion. As we read their voices and stories, we have more nuanced context as we navigate our own lives.
Yamani Hernandez, Executive Director, National Network of Abortion Funds
With reproductive rights under relentless assault, never has a book been more needed. Annie Finch has spanned five centuries and six continents to assemble writers who articulate a commonality of experience in every situation and emotion. Conceived and compiled with scrupulous scholarship, and with an illuminating introduction by Katha Pollitt, Choice Words will become a classic of both feminism and literature.
Robin Morgan, activist, author, host of Women’s Media Center Live
Silence, as much as anything, is why abortion’s such an easy target in America. Stories save lives. We need women to say, shamelessly, I had an abortion. I’m not sorry. I’m not afraid. This anthology is a valuable contribution to this work.
Molly Crabapple, author, Drawing Blood
Every kind of abortion you can imagine is represented here: abortions legal and illegal, safe and dangerous and fatal; abortions despite the wishes of others and abortions at the behest−the compulsion−of others; abortion as a claiming of self and abortion as an abnegation of self. There is abortion as tragedy, and also abortion as an occasion for wry comedy.
Katha Pollitt, author, Pro
This is a captivating collection, organized and curated as only Annie Finch can do. It is a book I will cherish for years to come.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author, Balm
There is only one anthology of literary writing about abortion in English, Choice Words. To spend five hours reading it is to be hit with waves of grief and peace, certainty and confusion, with shame and rape and the dead bodies of women. Mostly there is blood; soaking beds, pooling on sanitary pads and floors, being washed from hands and clothes. Abortion, as literature, is still gestating and still voiding. It took editor Annie Finch 20 years to collect the pieces in this book. Much of the writing is still raw, and all the authors struggle with language’s inability to convey everything that bodies, both pregnant and aborting, can hold. It’s the poets, especially – Leslie Marmon Silko, Gwendolyn Brooks, Diane di Prima, Audre Lorde – who convey the vacillation between love for the self and for the other during the experience of an abortion. Lorde: “It was a choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.
Jessie Kindig, Lux