New Prize-Winning Books by Anna Lena Phillips Bell and Ash Bowen

reviewed by Maryann Corbett

Definitions of poetry are numerous, but some of them have rhetorical forms that fix them in memory. Auden’s, for instance: “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” Auden’s sentence feels true of individual poems (think of his own “If I could tell you”). It feels even more true across the arc of a poet’s works (think of the darks and lights of Hopkins). Within most books, this mixing happens, sometimes with a shift of dark to light or vice versa. Naming the particular hue of a book overall is one way of comparing collections, of pointing out the uniqueness of each book, even in a pair of contemporaneous prize winners. The differently shaded books I review here are by poets whose work I’ve been aware of for at least a dozen years, each with a new book this year.

Might Could. Anna Lena Phillips Bell. Waywiser Books, 2026
Winner of the 20^th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Might Could’s title is an homage to its native place and language. The usage, says my search, is local to the American South and South Midlands, and the book’s notes get more specific about the home of the poems, “in what’s now called New Hanover County, North Carolina.”  In the dialects of those places, might could is a double modal maybe-I-can expression, open to hope.

The book’s largest, most hopeful focus is the longing for a child. While the book’s several impulses are distributed among its four sections, this theme gets pride of place in each.  In the opening section, a long poem explores the physical, female concerns of trying for pregnancy. It opens with the title “Your body is”—

            working. Your body is doing what
            it’s supposed to to do, everything we would expect
            for a body your body’s age. Your body is
            the age it is, and that fact cannot be escaped. . . .

and proceeds in the alternating tones of the clinician and the self-assessing woman with a full life being weighed against this large longing.

Another principal subject is the loved geography, botany, and zoology of the poet’s North Carolina environment, always carefully named to acknowledge its Indigenous first inhabitants. Sometimes immediate subjects and themes mix: “Wish for Continuance” is addressed to an abundance of marigolds, but about living through the night of a surprise hurricane, and “Might Could” is about pollination but also hints at needing help to conceive. Fondness for plants wild and domestic, and for gardening, is evident throughout.

Sometimes this fondness is joyous (see especially “Paean,” about peonies); sometimes it’s tinged with a fear of environmental damage wrought by powerful local industries. While I’m glad to have the extensive notes that give the full story of the chemical contamination behind these fears, I also wish I didn’t need them. End notes always arrive a bit late for full appreciation of a poem.

Still, the notes do make clear that pollution is a subtext to certain of the poems, and talking about it is an aspect of the book’s love of place. Other environmental harm is less directly human-made. The grievous damage wrought by two slow-moving hurricanes, in 2018 and 2020, is the focus of several more poems. “River Now Called Cape Fear” is frank about the destruction:

            Twenty steps from our front steps to where
            the ground turned gray. Over felled trees and up
            the bluff to find, on the forest floor, shrimp,
            washed miles inland, cooking there in the swelter . . .
           

The feel of the book overall, though, is not dark or fearful. Most of its poems are sonically interesting, near-surreal, sometimes with surprising syntax or inventive diction that reminds one of Berryman or Dickinson. They’re hard to excerpt: long and skinny, with strung-out sentences and riffs in repeating, short-lined meters that emphasize bounce, as in “Vase,” which she describes as

            enveloping,
            at present, air,
            the premise that
            outside the house
            something will bloom . . .

That bounce is a kind of signature. Rhythms are this poet’s principal tools in her books so far, and she deploys them in wide variety over all this book’s subjects. The book’s most charming aspect is its use of such meters in a sprinkling of small, lighthearted lyrics that celebrate the unimportant, like “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.

Poems like this are scattered among the several sections in varying sizes, sonics, and meters—about place cards, dental floss, a menstrual cup, scissors, spoons, pencils, the stuff of dailiness. They provide the book’s general sense of lightness, leavening the whole so that its darker concerns don’t weigh it down. Anna Lena Phillips Bell is telling us: celebrate it all, the hope, the danger, the flowers.

Other Edens. Ash Bowen. University of North Texas Press, 2026
Winner of the 2025 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

Celebration, hope, and uplift can make a poet’s work popular—witness the best-selling status of Mary Oliver—but they’re not every poet’s way of moving the reader. The dominant mode of Ash Bowen’s Other Edens is elegy, even lament. Call it the dark side of celebration.

The Edens of this book, one for each of its four sections, are not places of sinless perfection. Each is a locale in a bleak and unloveable Midwestern state, where a man and a woman struggle and fail in various ways. Before each section begins to present its particular couple, it prefaces the story with an Eden poem, a riff on the Genesis story of original failure.

In order, the book’s sections narrate—or sing, or bewail, or hint obliquely—stories from four marriages: first, the narrator’s family of origin, marred by divorce and strained finances; then his first marriage, with its end in suicide; then his second, another fractured relationship; and finally his third, still intact with its pleasures and sorrows.

“To speke of wo that is in mariage”—to put it Chaucer’s way—is an old theme, and Bowen surveys an assortment of woes in an assortment of approaches. The poverty and brokenness that grind at the narrator’s childhood are explored in the very plainspoken “The Bills” and “Guest Bed,” while the suicide always in the background of the book’s second section is treated in an extended sexual metaphor in “My Wife and Suicide Go Way Back” and in a mix of real and surreal in “When My Wife Took the Raft.” The gradual emotional death of the narrator’s second marriage gets the page-scattered dimeter lines of “My Cinderella” and the blank-verse sonnet form of “Weather Indicators.” The happy marriage finally arrived at gets a variety of relaxed meters, until it veers into a series of equally varied poems about illness and death, never clearly telling us whose.

The book’s most usual mode is a pentameter or tetrameter, sometimes exact, sometimes unconcerned about metrical precision. When it’s clear-cut, and joined to rhyme in a veiled scheme, it works to heighten the menace and sexual tension in poems like “Heat” —

            I do not make these stories up. What pales
            to Gramma’s father being one of her uncles?
            Beside my father stripping my sister’s panties
            below her ankles before he broke her in
            to welts with leather? . . .

The range, though, of approaches to rhythm is wide, stretching from sonnet through loose iambics to ghost-of-meter page-scatter sans punctuation, in “Fetish”:

            The fire grew closer and so did her lover
                                    They fucked for hours in the licking light

            until tractors came with fire brigades and blazes
                        slowed to a smolder

That a book about marriages includes poems about sex is not a surprise, though again the book has wide-ranging takes on it. “Fetish” illustrates the surreal approach, while “Honeymooners,” with its seemingly straightforward narrative about an evening at home with dinner and children, swerves to convey the weariness of a relationship going wrong.

The pure joy of lovemaking doesn’t arrive until the book’s final section, in poems like “Lovers’ Reunion at the University of Arkansas” and “Halfabecedarian Love Letter.”  Then in the middle of this final section of the book, the joy skids to a stop. Illness and death take over, at first no one’s in particular (“Oncology Bees Detect Cancer”), then sometimes the deaths of the famous (“The Last Love Letter of Marie Curie”), and at last the death of a “you” who may be the same person as the lover just rejoiced in, or may be the narrator, or may be someone else. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to want a clearer narrative. Clear enough is the tone of lament.

Also clear is a current running underneath these marriage stories: the narrator’s relationship with his father. As portrayed in the book’s first section, it’s tense, brittle with money troubles and fractured by divorce. It’s the sort of relationship that might die, but holds on in a wounded state amid the woes of the first, doomed marriage, disappears for a while during the confusions of the second, but gropes for understanding (after the father’s death?) in the book’s final poem, “Epilogue”:

            [T]onight, I’ve crept back here to Arkansas
            and cut the shop’s lock off. The penlight chatters
            between my teeth, the fog that forms my breath.
            My finger follows a frozen hieroglyph
            across the bottom of the photograph,
            someone’s black cursive that spells my father’s name.

So there you are: two award-winning books that make use of the pleasures of rhythm and form yet are nearly as different in emotional balance as they can be. There are reasons to have both on your shelves.

Maryann Corbett is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press). A seventh book, Notifications from the Unseen, is forthcoming from Slant Books.