One Thing Only is a song of essentials. Whether mirror, bucket, or pocketknife, Anna Lena Phillips Bell's sharp lyric takes us not just to the function of things but into the inherit politic alive in every artifact. The everyday inside the objects Bell captures is a material record of human use-- " suspect / once a human's touched it." Like every good archive, the disparate objects Only Things brings together have stories inscribed in their use. Curiosity, carelessness, and need are made 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 savor and be awed in.