Maybe The Body

“Maybe the Body is a radiant collection, a generous offering full of flora and fury, plums, and caterpillars. These poems are a field of inheritance where language, history, and lineage collide, and in Drake’s capable hands, the body becomes both question and altar.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders and Oceanic

“‘Sometimes, history is too beautiful to be believed,’ Asa Drake writes in her collection Maybe the Body, which is an extensive love song of memory, family, self, and the challenges of differentiating one from the other. When a speaker wades in a river that runs beneath an interstate, they think of a mother’s words: ‘Care first. Decide about love later.’ This book is about places and homes: ones we don’t want to lose, ones we find in others, and those we must decide to build for ourselves. Maybe the Body is the home I have longed for.”

—Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny and Ours

“To inhabit the pages of the deeply introspective Maybe the Body is to ‘walk/ through the valley of semblance.’ Here, investigation and insight lie in the backhanded compliment, the letter of resignation, the shifting landscape in a storm, the microaggression, the I love you, the surcharge, and the moments of transcription and erasure. Every poem perches resolutely on the hyphen, the intersection in a Venn diagram. This collection debuts Asa Drake as a sage of liminal states and spaces.”

—Janine Joseph, author of Decade of the Brain

A brilliant debut poetry collection by National Poetry Series finalist Asa Drake that explores the lineage and future lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance.

In her stunning debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, Asa Drake witnesses firsthand the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. She reaches for the lush landscapes—real and recounted—of the Philippines and the American South as she traces the lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance. As one poem reminds us, “it’s so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in.” These thirty-eight poems, threaded together with a six-part braided sequence, bind a multigenerational conversation between grandmothers, mothers, and aunts through a range of forms, from pantoums to prose poems. With its vivid imagery and an unforgettable lyrical perspective, Maybe the Body reconsiders the “natural” transactions of work, intimacy, and the poem itself.

One Way to Listen

“Asa Drake’s incisive debut chapbook, One Way to Listen, carves through simplistic narratives, filling in the new space with “nests of small animals,” surreal details that promote curiosity, and “room for uncertainty.” Operating with furious imagination, these poems return to interlocking loves: of family, place, and self—love especially in resistance to rising violence that this speaker, a Filipina American woman, is positioned to live in acute awareness of. Through such tenderness, Drake opens vital questions about relation and grief. In response to the 2021 Atlanta spa shooting, Drake’s speaker asks what outfit is appropriate to wear after a loss “no one will recognize.” These poems demand recognition. They process aggressions through layered metaphor. As she lays clothed in snakes who shut their mouths to keep warm, the speaker identifies the risks, always, of being a speaker. Of letting in the cold. A brilliant emerging writer, Asa Drake’s debut collection is urgent and unforgettable.”

–Taneum Bambrick, author of Vantage and Intimacies, Received

Winner of the 2021 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest, 2023 Florida Book Awards Recipient

Beauty Talk

Winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award

*More to come soon!*