Eve

Annie Finch’s brilliance as a young poet lies in her view of the world as complex: her passionate examinations of family relationships, of family history, of the search to understand one’s place in the world are underpinned by a syntax and a poetic design equally passionate and complex. . . . This is a formidable first volume of poetry.

Molly Peacock

The cadences and patterns of Annie Finch’s Eve feel like they have summoned and commanded form, not the reverse—which is a way of saying that this is a genuine poetry.

Robert Pinsky

Finch’s journey is toward an imagined paradise—toward the post-patriarchal possibilities of culture, language and human relationships. . . . To debut with such maturity and accomplishment is rare. Here is a full-fledged poet that literary culture will need to track and study in flight.

C.G. MacDonald

Annie Finch has given us a book rich in experience, women’s history, memory and form. She has made form a one-eyed woman looking out at us all, beckoning us to enter into her arena and be.

Sonia Sanchez

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. And it still works. Again and again I found myself shocked with pleasure as image, idea and sound spun out in a perfect braid. And Finch manages not just in a few poems, but throughout. . . . I’ll recommend it in the highest, with bells, whistles, fireworks.

C.L. Rawlins

I have read Eve with delight and amazement . . . Finch does indeed abolish linear time: past fables and present events coalesce. Einstein might have accompanied her on his violin. Whenever I get discouraged about some trends in contemporary poetry, I think of Annie Finch, a shining light, and I feel better.

Carolyn Kizer