Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. New work appears in The Georgia Review, Orion, Electric Literature, The Southern Review, and poets.org. Her honors include a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, and her writing and artist’s books have received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Penland School of Craft, and Marble House Project. Bell teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington, where she is the editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River.
MIGHT COULD
by anna lena phillips bell
Winner of the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
Foreword by the judge, Shane McCrae
In Might Could, Anna Lena Phillips Bell considers how to make a life in hurricane country, amid a verdant landscape touched by industrial pollution and the climate crisis. These formally inventive poems are imbued by a rare and refined attention. Poems to familiar plants and to everyday objects—marigolds, a vase, a spoon—invite the reader in, while others act as notes to self, offering wry reminders. At the collection’s core is an extraordinary crown, “Bref Doubles for a Late Conception,” imagining a hoped-for child. Even as they carry the knowledge of potential and actual harm, Bell’s intonation, uncanny and often exuberant diction, and subtle humor, Might Could contemplates meaningful companionship with one’s own body, with human family, and with the more-than-human world.
Profound. Musical. Grounded.
Pub. Mar. 1, 2026
What People Are Saying
“In Might Could, Anna Lena Phillips Bell emerges as one of the best lyric poets writing in America today, and simultaneously emerges as an even more profoundly rare poet—a poet who has discovered not only a new song, but a new way of making musicality the first concern of poetry. Hers is an irresistible art..”
— Shane McCrae, judge of the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and author of New and Collected Hell
“If you are from the South, you’ll immediately get the title, which encompasses the formalist-leaning Bell’s linguistic play with the sounds and natural images of the South. Bell’s gems of poems are always as carefully and delicately crafted as her artist’s books.”
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Poetry of 2026
“I love these poems by Anna Lena Phillips Bell, and I trust you will too. Love her grounded attention to people and plants and place. Love how she worries and wonders about the living world. Love how her phrases sing and how her lines dance over these pages. There is so much to love in Might Could. I’m delighted this book has arrived.”
— Camille Dungy, author of America, A Love Poem
“Anna Lena Phillips Bell is a marvelous poet. But what does it mean to say that? For me, it means the thrill of music, the delight in and love of speech that comes to life on every page of her humane and tender collection, Might Could…. Bell is a talent to reckon with.”
— ILYA KAMINSKY, author of DEAF republic
Excerpt from
Might Could
Against Stoicism
An itch, untouched,
will twitch and wail
till an answering scratch
unhitches hell.
A tempered squeal
can conjure oil.
Squeak, wheel.
You may as well.
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“Against Stoicism” by Anna Lena Phillips Bell was first published in The Sewanee Review. You can read this poem and more in Bell’s collection Might Could.
Petunia
Not that I ever liked you
before, but each spring
till now you’ve kept yourself
in the world, died back
to the plain ground
and come again, answering
no invitation of ours but saying
a trumpet’s yes to the part sun
by the front porch where once
presumably a hanging basket
waved above the brick,
above the sandy soil, long after
the first of you were taken
from their own places
but before they were made to live one
season only—or you escaped
that too, persisting, seeds
in the sand, seeds
in the antlion dens, returning
to make each summer
furred leaves and unabashed
purple flowers, deep and cool,
no hint of subtlety,
scent light and almost
irritatingly gentle
but there, inescapable,
making a one-plant world beside
the porch edge, and I like you
now, I know you now,
and now, six years here and well
into June, nothing
of you, no leaf, no sign.
“Petunia” by Anna Lena Phillips Bell was first published in first appeared in The Georgia Review. You can read this poem and more in Bell’s collection Might Could.