Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist. Poetry editor Lucia LoTempio conducted this interview.
Donate to The Offing! Our Patreon supporters received early access to this Q&A with Asa Drake and received other perks. The Offing pays our contributors, and we appreciate the help of all our supporters in sustaining our work.
◆
Lucia LoTempio: I’m so taken by the mentions of friendship in this book, and the inclusion of a (FR)I(E)NDEX. What do you think about friendship as impactful to your creativity? For fun, I like to think of my writer friends and I as in an intimate school or movement as our interests and styles intersect and bounce off of each other—how would you describe the “school” or “movement” that would see you and your writer friends at the vanguard?
Asa Drake: I’m so relieved that you enjoyed the (FR)I(E)NDEX! I worried that it might come off as contrived, but it’s a tribute to the many informal mediums I love for conversation—text messages, dms, Whatsapp and such. So many historical schools and movements are defined by time and place, but I genuinely believe the most vibrant literary salons today are happening in group chats, and maybe they’re named accordingly, too? If so, I belong to the Hungry Poets and Millennial Problems school of poetry but am strongly influenced by others. I live so far away from most of my writer friends, so I have to believe that the digital forum can be a fruitful space.
I find the immediacy of being able to send a snapshot of a new draft so alluring! Not for critique, really, but just to say that I’m working something out, and I want someone else to be a witness to my efforts. Carolina Hotchandani and I formally call this practice “what a cute baby,” and the name pretty much sums up the rules of the exchange. If we invoke “what a cute baby,” we always respond by noticing a draft’s promising traits. It’s so easy to doubt first attempts, but friends have salvaged many vulnerable lines and even the concept of the (FR)I(E)NDEX with reassuring texts.
LL: The book is so spectacular in its explorations of lineage and inheritance, and I love too pairing that with looking back to a younger self. When writing toward family and self, when do you turn to the lyric, metaphoric, and when do you reach for clear stated diction?
AD: I frequently choose poetry when I think the lyric mode offers all the clarity I can afford—when I might alternatively say, “there is no easy way to say this.” I started writing these poems to a younger self, but that wasn’t quite sufficient for the book as a whole. Over the years, the “you” has shifted outward and is so frequently specific, a correspondence with friends, though poems are often the texts I don’t send. I have the benefit of invoking an audience who exists in the same world that I do. The poem is the one place where I don’t offer the courtesy of making myself legible to others. I assume an ongoing conversation. But the risk is that intimacy, that exchange, can be interpreted as opacity.
LL: There is real and wonderful tenderness in the tone and atmosphere of this book, especially toward small animals like the rabbits that hop to the forefront. How do you approach crafting tone and atmosphere in your writing process?
AD: When I’m considering tone, I’m considering power dynamics within the population of the poem, or between the speaker and the audience, or between the speaker and her geography. I want to know if the language I’m using emotionally corresponds with the place I’m tying it to. Could I really say these words in this space? Is this the voice I would use? And if not, how can I gesture toward whatever linguistic camouflage I think is necessary? Where am I in the moment that I suddenly feel dishonest or insufficient? Often, it’s within the context of the garden or the woods—some space where people are less likely to be—that I have to imagine what might happen in place of these power dynamics. With what tone may I approach the “more-than-human world,” a phrase Kenzie Allen introduced me to.
LL: The imagery and metaphor in this book is consistently stunning! I love the final two sentences of the book in the prose poem “Toyo”: “The metaphor is a sign I am lonely. So you can hear me better.” Can you speak to the power of poetry as artistic expression?
AD: Thank you! That last line is so hard for me to read out loud—I swing between wanting to illustrate the gravity of the thought and laughing at my own earnestness. Often, to make myself agreeable, I’ve been conditioned to laugh. As a way to avoid conflict. I think I turn to poems, not for answers, but for a way to address the intangible with sincerity and complexity. The poem practices confrontation. It’s a rehearsal for the self I’d like to be. And often this means reframing history and events in a way that offers me agency. Within a poem, I always have a choice.
LL: The way you opened each section with almost an epigraph-style poem gave such a specific entry point. Can you talk about the evolution of this choice for organizing and designating in the book?
AD: Until recently, my professional life revolved entirely around archives. It’s probably not surprising that many of the ways I consider the body (of this book and my own) are within the context of archives and access. The personal and public archive can be tools for preservation. Consider, for example, the mission statement of the National Archives, which is, to “preserve, protect, and share the historical records of the United States to promote public inquiry and strengthen democratic participation.” Consider these verbs: “preserve, protect, and share.” Who is on each end? Who chooses which histories are preserved? And with whom are these histories shared? The answer doesn’t feel obvious to me, but the mission is written in a way that suggests the answer should be clear. In 1995, Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji coined a term for this problem within the archive: implicit bias. The result of implicit bias is that the archive can be a silent space.
The prose sections or openings are my way of speaking into these silent spaces and offering context for my writing. This is a practice that was modeled for me by so many wonderful poets (E. Hughes, Jessica Q. Stark, Saretta Morgan, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Cynthia Parker-Ohene, Sokunthary Svay, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, among others) and that’s more fully theorized by the work of writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman. I wanted to offer clarity and precision for readers who might recognize some mirror of their own experiences. So many of us inherit oral histories of events that are virtually unacknowledged in the United States. I wanted each of these “openings” to begin a conversation that a reader might continue with their adjacent story.
LL: Something I loved the most in Maybe the Body is how the attention and voice in the book moves—sometimes it’s interrogating racism and the cascade of micro-agressions, sometimes seeking understanding of a family history, sometimes dislocated by a corporate isolation, sometimes so linked to time and place, and by the end, feels a more complete and fully realized self. (And there are more modes I am sure I have missed!) What do you see as linking the modes of approach in this book?
AD: This is such a generous reading. These lenses always make me think of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and about what gets lost as we try to process our observations into language. Each theoretical lens offers new language that helps us witness the world around us. There’s also the part of Ways of Seeing that haunts me: “Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.” Within this statement is also a state of doubt about our own belonging. What happens when others refuse to acknowledge us?
Throughout Maybe the Body, I’m trying to make myself understand the parameters of what makes for a safe space. Under what circumstances do I want to be seen? How does this affect how I interpret the world? I’m terrible at computations, but I love the idea of mathematical proof. If we list and define our rules and limitations, are we better able to understand the shape of the space we inhabit? I always ask my students, “What detail would you need to include to make any particular moment recognizable to yourself.” That’s the image or language that’s most important for me. I want a future version of myself to be able to trust my poems and to be acknowledged by them.
LL: Poems titled “To someone who’s heard I love you too many times” thread through the book and ground the book’s attempts to pin language to meaning. What was the process of writing these poems? How did they come to be?
AD: Each is an exercise in sincerity, but I think the revisitation and repetition force a degree of reinvention. Especially with the phrase ‘I love you,’ it’s so easy to take the meaning of words for granted—as the person saying them or as the person hearing them. I wanted to reclaim a really common phrase and insist on meaning, to return to it some protective charm. When I talk to close friends, so often ‘I love you’ is the sign-off we use. And it gives me a little rush each time. I know it’s imbued with care and devotion. This is what we can give each other. When I was writing this sequence, I wanted to bring this version of ‘I love you’ to other people in my life, people who are still learning how to love.
LL: You also have another book coming out this year (Beauty Talk)! How has that process been, shepherding two books so close together as a debut author? Are the books sisters, twins, cousins, estranged—?
AD: They’re like sisters from the TeleNovela Channel! One is full of heart and obligation, the other indulges in being very sour. Beauty Talk is the younger sister with a few hand-me-down poems that didn’t quite fit in Maybe the Body—poems that are wonderfully sour and that helped me draft something in a different voice. It’s full of poems that aren’t afraid to take up space, and it’s grown so much with the guidance of Noemi’s incredible editors (shout out to Anthony Cody, Grace Gaynor, Sara Borjas and Diana Arterian).
Both books were accepted by presses within a few months of each other, and as a result many of the poems were drafted side by side. I think I benefited from the belief (with scattered deadlines) that I constantly had more time and space to experiment with new drafts. The last poem added to Maybe the Body was written three hours before I turned it in, and in some ways, writes toward the second collection. Now that Beauty Talk is starting the layout process, I’m realizing just how much I valued having these two different but related shapes to write into. Each project gave the other permission to remain plastic and in motion.
LL: Is there a line or sentence or section or poem that feels like a talisman in this book? Something that could conjure up the essence of the book like a spell?
AD: There’s one poem I’ve never read aloud, and I think it’s the oldest in the book. “In the Tradition of Women Who’ve Blessed Me to Transfer Their Virtues” was written in June of 2019. This was before the Covid-19 pandemic. I’d just bought my house in Florida after receiving a huge promotion at work. The line “One year in the middle / of my life I asked, how full do I want to be,” was written from a place of safety. I felt, in that moment, that I could give myself permission to want so many things. Being able to list the acts of care before knowing why I would want them—being able to revisit the possibility of fullness I imagined in that moment still generates so many future possibilities, even when I’m much less sure that fullness is something I can offer or afford.
