One Thing Only

Overview

One Thing Only is a song of essentials. Whether mirror, bucket, or pocketknife, Anna Lena PhillipsBell’s sharp lyric takes us not just to the function of things but into the inherit politic alive inevery artifact. The everyday inside the objects Bell captures is a material record of humanuse—“suspect / once a human’s touched it.” Like every good archive, the disparate objects OnlyThings brings together have stories inscribed in their use. Curiosity, carelessness, and need aremade legible on the surface of even a stepstool: “enough to reach what you could not /otherwise—the ledge, the light, / the long-saved bottle.” Bell’s attention is something to savorand be awed in.

Author Biography

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Might Could, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. New writing appears in Orion, The Rumpus, The Southern Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, and poets.org, and new artist’s books have been exhibited at Abecedarian Gallery and Asheville Bookworks. Bell’s work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Marble House Project, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and awards from the North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellowship pr