Publishing Spring 2026
Might Could
by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
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 profound, tender poems establish an expansive sense of place and play. With precise 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.
Shane McCrae, judge of the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and author of New and Collected Hell
“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..”
Camille Dungy, author of America, A Love Poem
“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.”
Meet Anna Lena
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.