Halves Holding Tight: On Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s Might Could (Waywiser Books, 2026)
By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Before I get too far into reviewing Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s latest collection, Might Could, I need to disclose my bias. The minute I looked at the table of contents, I knew I was going to love this book, because on page 33, there is a poem called “Turkeytangle Fogfruit.” This plant has many names, as the epigraph to the poem points out by listing over thirty different names for it. Yes, all 33 and, yes, all in the epigraph (it’s sort of like a little bonus list poem before the poem itself begins). I call it frogfruit and it’s my favorite groundcover. It’s not flashy like creeping phlox. Its flowers are small and unassuming, but butterflies and bees love them and it takes light foot traffic and mowing. It’s lovely because of its stability and practicality, not in spite of it. The same might be said for the poems in Might Could which ground the reader with a clear-eyed, yet lyrical, vision of the natural world.
One of the most innovative ways Bell communicates this vision is through form and meter. Yes, form and meter can be innovative, but perhaps not in the way you may think. Though sonnets in iambic pentameter might be what comes to mind for many readers when thy hear “form” in a poetic context or perhaps even Jericho Brown’s nonce form the doublet, Bell manages to standout by returning to seldom employed (or at least seldom employed in 21st century American poetics) forms favored in 16th century France such as the rondine and the rondelet.
The poem “Rondine of things seen in the river” is particularly moving (pun intended). A list poem similar to the epigraph of the previously mentioned “Turkeytangle Fogfruit,” this poem uses the rondine’s end word repetition combined with a trochaic metrical pattern (though there is room for disagreement here and I’ll get to that later) to mimic the feeling of sitting on a bank watching the world go by in the water below. The poem gives us the discards of both the natural and human-made worlds: “pine needles, peanut shells, a live-oak leaf,/ cigarette butt, beer can, one green grape.”
In another repeating French form, the rondelet, Bell creates a lovely little talisman for pregnant women everywhere (or people going though chemo or anything else that can create smell and taste aversions). The poem “Rondelet of beloved things remembered amid strong aversion to numerous other things, e.g. cruciferous vegetables, the smell of food left on a burner, the smell of scented trash bags or of sausages, the need of going to work” is short enough that its inclusion in its entirety feels not only acceptable but necessary, as a single line on its own can’t capture the beauty and skill in Bell’s poem.
Damselflies, silverbells,
raspberries, lizards’ throats.
Damselflies, silverbells,
every kind of flower’s smell;
to lie down in cool sheets,
to be lain upon by cats—
damselflies, silverbells.
In a simple list of well-ordered things, Bell communicates protection, comfort, and joy.
But what does “well-ordered” mean in this instance? Bell is able to create these intense lyrical moments through her skilled use of non-iambic meters with thoughtful metrical substitutions. When I said earlier that this rondine was trochaic, it’s because of these substitutions. I could see a case being made that it’s accentual meter or even the more traditional meter for rondine’s in English, iambic. Is it trochaic with a missing end to the final foot or is it iambic sans initial unstressed syllables? So much of how you scan Bell’s work depends on your own accent and way of reading poetry. And honestly, for me, scanning a poem is like dissecting a frog (the frog dies and you make a mess), though there are many contemporary poets who love scansion and I say “more power to them,” but it’s not my jam. I prefer to just let myself sit and get lost in her words, such as in the poem “List” (which, quite cleverly, is not one of the book’s many list poems and uses a different definition of the word entirely). Lines such as “Lean me to you,/ me to your up-/ standing, held in/ tilt, in kilter” and “here I loosen,/ list in to who/ is who I’d over/ ever lean to” hint at sense, but never quite congeal into clarity for me. This also happens in the poem “Scissors,” with “A pumping heart/ propels your knives/ to sunder paper,/ flower from stem,/ and each snip/ only as sharp/ as the join between/ the halves holds tight.” And this gesturing is what I love about them. This is not to say Bell’s work doesn’t have narrative and syntactical clarity, because it does, such as in the poem “Early Star” where the speaker is describing what the poet Maggie Smith would refer to as a “beauty emergency,” to a non-responsive companion (to name just one of many poems that this is true of). It’s just that sometimes she lets that clarity take a rest in the service of pure lyricism.
However, whether lyricism or narrative clarity are in control of a poem, the thing that remains constant is Bell’s loyalty to factual accuracy. Some poems by other poets engaging in ecopoetics can’t say the same. Like loon calls in a jungle scene of a film, poets sometimes latch onto pet sounds and images so vehemently that we end up with vining azaleas and susurrations in all manner of unlikely places and times of year (so much so that I’ve sometimes lost hours to deep dives trying to figure out if azaleas really do grow on vines).
This isn’t a new issue. In the essay “The Contemporary Poet and the Natural World,” which was first published in the Georgia Review in 1993 and reprinted in the 2001 anthology After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, the poet Brendan Galvin attributes some of this disconnect to “make it strange,” saying that some confessional poetry “has pushed the sides of the envelope so far that whatever was enclosed seems to have fallen out somewhere in transit.” Thankfully, the poetry of Anna Lena Phillips Bell delivers the envelope intact and full to bursting with love letters to the natural world as it is while still giving us the internal workings of a person struggling through life in 21st-century America. When the speaker says “Not our house, safe outside the floodplain,/ but even after weeks after that, the world said rotting” in “River Now Called Cape Fear” or in the “Bref Doubles for a Late Conception” found on page 49 with “to keep you, more than we know/ must be true: more/ than the fear we’ll be left/ in the before, closed//out from that love no one/ can describe to their satisfaction,” the reader is getting the gossipy buzz we get from a confessional poem, but in the tone of lyrical ecopoetics.
In the essay mentioned above, Galvin rails against the distancing from (or worse yet misrepresentation of) the natural world in contemporary confessional poetry by noting “…why should owls and fall warblers be more boring than, say, yet another poem about a poet’s divorce or sex life?” Bell’s poems seem to respond “let’s have both” (though not on the topics of divorce and sex life specifically, but you get the picture). Similar to the works of Kathryn Nuernberger and Brandi George in their attention to the details of the natural world, though different in tone and theme, the poems in Might Could, much like those in Bell’s previous collection Ornament (University of North Texas Press, 2017), blend confessional and ecopoetic traditions to the delight and amazement of the reader.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work has appeared recently in Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Crab Orchard Review. Her first book, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, is currently available from Kelsay Books. Her poetry collection centered on her experiences with ovarian cancer, Little Stone, Little Stone, is forthcoming in the fall of 2026 from Sheila-Na-Gig. She serves as a member of the board for Anhinga Press and sporadically hosts the Meter Cute interview series on the Meter&Mayhem Substack and YouTube channel.
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