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.
At Yale University she studied poetry, anthropology, the history of the English language with Marie Borroff, and Versification with Penelope Laurans, graduating magna cum laude in 1979.
After traveling in Africa with painter Alix Bacon, in the early eighties she settled in New York's East Village, where she worked at Natural History Magazine and self-published and performed the rhythmical experimental longpoemThe Encyclopedia of Scotland.
In 1984, Finch encountered the work of Ntozake Shange in a bookstore and "recognized in her a soul-mother, someone else for whom poetry was performative, sacred, curative, indispensable, physical.
[7] Finch earned a Ph.D in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1990, studying feminist theory with Adrienne Rich and pursuing a self-designed concentration in Versification under the supervision of Diane Middlebrook.
[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.
[11] 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.
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] 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.
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.
[20][21][22] Her essay collection The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (2005) includes writings on women poets including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Audre Lorde, Lydia Sigourney, Sara Teasdale, and Phillis Wheatley, many based in feminist theory.
"[27] In an interview Finch stated, "Some of my poems are lyric, some narrative, some dramatic, and some meditative, but all are concerned with the mystery of the embodied sacred.".
"[29] Finch started a blog called American Witch in 2010 [30] and has published several articles about earth-centered spirituality in The Huffington Post.
[31][32] Composers who have set Finch's poems to music include Stefania de Kennessey, Matthew Harris, and Dale Trumbore.
Finch's translation from French of the poetry of Louise Labé was published by University of Chicago Press, honored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and represented in the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
In the preface to Spells and in The Body of Poetry, Finch explains that the physical qualities of the original poem, including meter and rhyme, are central to her translation process.