Long-tailed finch length. It has a prominent roundish black bib on its throat and upper chest and a long pointed black tail. It has pinkish brown upperparts with paler plumage below its bib over the lower breast and abdomen. It has a grey head, a white ear-patch, and black lores. It has black patches on its upper flanks and its rump and undertail coverts are white. The beak colour of the adult long-tailed finch varies from red through orange to yellow. The subspecies with red beaks is sometimes called Heck's grass finch "Poephila acuticauda hecki", and the nominate subspecies with orange or
Annie Finch focused on the incantatory use of form in "Eve", writing, "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." Poet and critic Ron Silliman 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