Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s poems have appeared in the Southern Review, 32 Poems, and Poetry International. The recipient of an NC Arts Council Fellowship, she teaches at UNC Wilmington and is editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near the Cape Fear River. (Author photo by Allie Mullin)
Winner, 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
In this debut collection, Anna Lena Phillips Bell explores the foothills of the Eastern U.S., and the old-time Appalachian tunes and Piedmont blues she was raised to love. With formal dexterity—in ballads and sonnets, Sapphics and amphibrachs—the poems in Ornament traverse the permeable boundary between the body and the natural world.
“Anna Lena Phillips Bell makes a stellar debut in her Vassar Miller Prize-winning volume of poems, Ornament. Her formal virtuosity and luscious wordplay have the lightest of touches. The poems feel as if a winged being brushed by, leaving her readers subtly changed. Whether she’s writing about slugs mating or wasps returning to a nest destroyed, she is in sync with the wild world, yet burnished by love. Her love poems are written in the almost shocked realization that the poet, a child of the Piedmont with country songs in her head, can both revel in nature and have her own nature recognized by another.... If a secret garden had a chance to speak, might it be in the voice of Anna Lena Phillips Bell?”
—Molly Peacock
“Brilliantly melding influences from Blues and Appalachian music to Dickinson and Frost, the adept, bold poems of Ornament offer praise and homage to the beleaguered, beautiful environments of the American southeast and of a poet’s soul. This is the kind of carefully built and deeply understood poetry that engages experience in a transformation so thorough it becomes kinetic, changing our felt sense of how the world moves.”
—Annie Finch
University of North Texas Press
