MIGHT COULD in “Able Muse Review”

An excerpt from Issue Number 32 - Winter 2025; read the full review

“Bell has found a way to write political poetry that is also deeply personal, ecological poetry that is also formally accomplished, and domestic poetry that is also philosophically searching. At its heart, Might Could contemplates meaningful companionship—with one’s own body, with the human family, and with the more-than-human world—and finds in that contemplation both the grounds for grief and the grounds for staying. The closing poem leaves us with frogs calling through contaminated air, their “bright triangular / pebbles, or petals, / made with air / and carried by air / to and through / the window,” and the instruction to keep listening. It is an ending that, like the best of Bell’s work, insists on attention as both aesthetic and ethical practice.

To discover for yourself why McCrae calls Bell “one of the best lyric poets writing in America today,” pick up your own copy of Might Could. I know that I will revisit its lines of dazzling formal dexterity; I will muse again on its themes that delve into the troubled ecology of a beloved place and those that scintillate in their illumination of the quotidian.”

“A Review of Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Might Could”by Alexander Pepple
Able Muse Review, Issue Number 32 - Winter 2025

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https://www.ablemuse.com/v32/alexander-pepple--book-review-anna-lena-phillips-bell-might-could.html