Winner, 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.

"Ornament is a kind of tribute album. The poet, who is also a banjo player, pays tribute in many poems to the old-time music of the Carolinas, and like the music, her poems are marked by bursts of lyric...