Executive Overview
In contemporary American poetry, few collections confront the architecture of doubt with the linguistic dexterity and emotional resonance found in Might Could, the latest volume by poet Anna Lena Phillips Bell. Published by Waywiser Books (88 pages, $19) and recognized as the winner of the prestigious 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, the collection takes its title from a quintessential Southern colloquialism. As Phillips Bell unpacks it, the phrase "might could"—meaning "maybe I could" or "I might be able to"—operates in a semantic space far more nuanced than either verb achieves in isolation. It captures a state of provisional possibility, a simultaneous leaning toward a desired outcome and a polite, defensive retreat from certainty.
At its core, Might Could is an intimate, structurally innovative exploration of fertility struggles, the labyrinthine emotional tolls of trying to conceive, and the fragile optimism that underpins human endurance. Through unconventional syntax, iterative poetic forms like the French bref double, and a masterclass in acoustic rhythm—leveraging consonance, alliteration, and deliberate line breaks—Phillips Bell constructs a poetic landscape where looking backward is frequently the only way to move forward. This review-analysis examines the mechanics of Phillips Bell’s verse, evaluating how form and content merge to articulate the delicate tension between profound longing and the fear of repeating past griefs.
Detailed Chronology and Thematic Progression
The structural DNA of Might Could relies heavily on recursive loops, echoing the psychological experience of grappling with prolonged uncertainty. Rather than moving in a linear fashion from despair to resolution, Phillips Bell’s collection circles back on itself, demanding that readers retrace their steps to fully grasp the emotional stakes of the present moment.
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The Mechanics of the Title Poem and the Botanical Metaphor
The collection opens its thematic inquiry in the title poem, "Might Could," where Phillips Bell immediately establishes an atmosphere of convoluted syntax and cognitive bouncing. The poem opens with a stark philosophical observation: "What flowers do so well / we struggle to."
By employing this deliberate syntactic delay, the poet forces the reader to stall. Upon reading the first line, the natural expectation is an immediate revelation of botanical behavior. Instead, the introduction of "we" as the subject in the second line diverts the reader’s trajectory, sending them looping back to the initial line to connect the struggle. The subject of this struggle is biological reproduction, rendered through a lush, flowing cascade of consonance, alliteration, and alternating trochees and iambs:
stamen, pistil, petal—
white-ruffled, yellow, wilder—
with style and stigma,
anther, answer
new to new to new.
The human speaker disrupts the botanical meditation once more with awkward, self-correcting syntax: "Mostly they do / require, as we do, aid." Here, the reader must look backward to decode the human reality—that the speakers require medical or external intervention to conceive a child.
In contrast to human hesitation, the poem depicts the efficient, instinctual pollination of flowers with sharp $t$-sounds and mellifluous $l$-sounds: "they orchestrate / the shift, the yellow freight / of pollen to and fro." Ultimately, the couple learns endurance from the natural world. They gather themselves, though carrying the weary weight of repetition: "We gather / ourselves, again." In a poem dedicated to an uncertain outcome, the phrase "Might Could" signals the absolute faintest flicker of hope.
The Bref Double Crown: A Circle of Provisional Possibility
Running as a structural spine through the collection is "Bref Doubles for a Late Conception," a crown of seven interconnected poems. The bref double is a demanding French poetic form comprising fourteen partially rhymed lines reminiscent of a sonnet. True to the crown’s traditional architecture, each poem in the sequence begins with the final line of its predecessor, while the final line of the seventh poem circles back to become the opening line of the first, sealing the sequence in a closed loop.
In the opening pair of the crown, the couple’s fertility struggles are refracted through contradictions and double negatives. As one observer of Southern idiom notes, "might could" inherently carries a polite evasion: no, but I’m too polite to say. The poems look backward while gesturing forward, introducing a "New now that is not the last." Despite sailing traditionally implying forward momentum, the speaker admits a desire to "sail back out / of you," anchoring the future in the past: "the future / I’d been accustomed to."
The psychological exhaustion of the process is captured in the double-negative query: "would we be / not not juddering but not / so worn, weary?" A slight, hesitant push forward arrives in the penultimate line’s inverted syntax: "What we were made to, let’s." The poem concludes with the striking, idiosyncratic word "latening"—a deliberate inversion of a pregnancy’s anticipated "quickening."
As the crown progresses into its second and third parts, the paradox deepens. The speaker addresses her own body, attempting to relinquish the impulse of micro-management in favor of radical acceptance. Her body is framed as "Not / a thing to be managed," but rather an entity to be approached with childlike trust and astonishment: "If I say you / handsome vessel."
The third poem introduces the first tangible note of acoustic and emotional hope, characterized by whispering $s$-sounds and resonant $l$-sounds:
If I say you safe—
then bell, then ball
of cells, then coracle
of self-and-self-selecting swellat first so small
as to be indiscernible
Yet, this optimism is immediately challenged in the sixth poem. As the pregnancy progresses, the couple must learn to trust an unknowable future while constantly haunted by the fear of regression: "To keep you, more than we know / must be true: more / than the fear we’ll be left / in the before."
The emotional zenith of the sequence arrives when the speakers articulate the profound paradox of simultaneous desire and preemptive grief—the agony of wanting something so intensely that the sheer weight of the want becomes its own burden:
that love no one
can describe to their satisfaction,
the kind we have been supposed
to want; too, supposedto go on from the want of.
The crown culminates in the seventh poem, where the arrival of "quickened days" announces a successful conception. The final line—which loops back to become the opening line of the first bref double—transforms in meaning. No longer a statement of weary initiation, it resonates with hard-won optimism:
half revealed, fuller, most, none,
and in it us, awhiling throughthe quickened days, each one
a new now, not the last.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Form, Sound, and Lexical Play
Phillips Bell’s technical proficiency extends far beyond the bref double. Throughout Might Could, the poet demonstrates a distinct fascination with lists—cataloging flora, fauna, and emotional inventories—often filtered through loosely interpreted traditional French forms.
Prosodic Experiments and Constraints
In "Undoing," Phillips Bell constructs a melodious monometer villanelle featuring consonantal rhyme repetends centered on the stark realization: "The list / won’t last." Similarly, she titles a slant-rhymed rondelet with an exhaustive, highly specific inventory: "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."
While purists might critique a loose adherence to strict French metrical rules, Phillips Bell’s triumphs lie in her unexpected domestic integrations. In "Rondine of things seen in a river," she successfully weaves industrial debris—specifically "chunks of Styrofoam"—into a deeply lyrical line without sacrificing acoustic elegance.
The Poetics of Listing and Lean
The love poem "List" explores an alternative definition of the noun, pivoting on physical inclination and balance. Beginning with the imperative "Lean me to you," the poem employs rapid-fire alliteration and consonance to pull words into tight alignment: "held in / tilt, in kilter." Through hyphenated line breaks, the poet builds a metaphorical shelter: "let the space be- / tween you and me / be dry."
This emphasis on spatial safety is mirrored visually throughout the book by the section headings: /, two slash marks leaning toward one another like a structural lean-to. It is a subtle, brilliant visual echo of the collection’s overarching motif of leaning into uncertainty.
Official Statements and Critical Reception
Though Might Could stands firmly on its literary merits, the collection’s selection as the winner of the 20th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize places it within a distinguished lineage of contemporary verse. The Hecht Prize, administered by Waywiser Press, is awarded annually to a poetry collection of exceptional merit by a writer who has published no more than one previous book of verse, or whose work demonstrates significant artistic maturity.
While formal press releases from Waywiser Books have emphasized the collection’s tonal range—blending formal rigor with emotional vulnerability—early critical reception has underscored Phillips Bell’s mastery of regional idiom. Reviewers have noted that by anchoring the collection in the idiom "might could," Phillips Bell elevates domestic and somatic vulnerability to the level of philosophy. The poetry avoids the traps of sentimentality or clinical detachment, choosing instead to inhabit the exact emotional frequency of a population suspended between hope and hesitation.
Future Outlook
With the publication and critical success of Might Could, Anna Lena Phillips Bell cements her status as a vital voice in contemporary American poetry. By demonstrating that formal innovation and deeply personal narratives are not mutually exclusive, she has carved out a distinct space for poetry that speaks to the complexities of bodily autonomy, reproductive grief, and quiet resilience.
As the collection closes with "Place Card"—a deceptively simple three-stanza poem about a handwritten setting at a dinner table—Phillips Bell offers a final, restorative directive to her readers:
find
relief, near infinite—not everywhere is your place,
not every purpose yours.
Arrive, and be at rest:
not everyplace, just this.
In an era defined by hyper-acceleration and demands for absolute certainty, Might Could offers a courageous counter-narrative. It grants both its speakers and its readers permission to pause, to acknowledge vulnerability, and to accept that while not every place in the world belongs to us, the spaces we inhabit in our tentative hope are more than enough. The collection’s rightful place on the shelf of contemporary masterworks is firmly secured.
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