Maybe the Body: Poems

by Asa Drake

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.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

93 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 24, 2026

About the author

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 can be found on The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry Daily. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.

Reviews

[MONIQUE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for this EARC! This is a beautiful collection of poetry about the body that is explored for all angles including economic and not limited to lineage. The prose in this collection seems to be written in riddles at times but if you take time unraveling them they will provide a warm and understood feeling. One line I particularly liked was from the poem “to someone who’s said I LOVE YOU too many times”

“I understood the risk of it. The sound that alters
My heart. The sound I could not make
For myself. My mother didn’t want me to repeat
Her life. She wanted me to recognize
the possibility of repetition.”

This is a beautiful collection and I encourage people to check it out if poetry and prose is your jam. 💛⭐️💛

[Miss✧Pickypants ᓚᘏᗢ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry is so personal and often hard to decipher
what exactly the poet is trying to convey, to the reader.

But poems allow for freedom w i t h

t
h
e

4mmmm@ ,

so that is FUN!

Here, this debut of poems are modern and personal, relaying experiences of,
among other thing:
fitting in ( & not), language understanding (& not)
how we say something so much it diminishes its meaning
silk, and our current political climate.
Some lovely wordsmithing, indeed.

[Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sealey Challenge 2026: 2/31

To be honest, this collection was both stylistically and thematically different from what I expected based on the synopsis. I was initially a little hesitant in the first part as the poems have a great deal of ambiguity to them. Yet, I found myself pleasantly surprised and drawn in by Drake's approach.

This narrative style of drifting between physical spaces and timelines felt like intimate glimpses into the poet's life. Drake is exploring the concepts of family, identity, love, and connection mostly through interactions and self-questioning which felt more like being in conversation with me as a reader which I found engaging. Additionally, nature and food repeatedly popped up as metaphors. Usually, I enjoy food as a metaphorical device, but I actually found the nature bits to be more my favorite here. Some of them truly felt as if they were crafting these almost dreamlike landscapes which made this collection more three dimensional and lived in for me. I am immensely impressed by Drake's storytelling here and the emotional intensity she was able to maintain throughout the collection for me.

That said, I can see the ambiguity proving challenging for some readers, particularly those who are less familiar with prose poetry or the aesthetic stylistic choices this collection draws upon. Yet, I urge readers to give it a chance and spend some time with it because it's definitely worth it when you finally get what this collection is doing!

Thank you to the publisher, Tin House, for an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions shared in this review are my own!

[James O'Bannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in”.

Simply buzzing from this one. Considerations on home amidst displacement, what it means to love people in a place that wants us all dead, and what do we do with all the things we carry from them; is its calculable? By the end, the camera faces us all and asks in the most poignant and heartbreaking way imaginable how we reckon with our own survival. Will feel this one for the rest of my days I fear.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

I so love this poet's observations and use of nature. Proetry (prose poems) that you can dip into like your tongue on the sugary product of honeysuckle flowers. While the middle of the collection did not grip me as much as the beginning and end, I was entirely consumed by Drake's ability to capture the fleeting moments of life in verse. I wish I could quote some of these poems.. but I cannot! So instead I'll offer some keywords: passionflowers pinning you down, feeding the rabbits and being that kind of animal, flowers as shortcuts to desire, gardeners and cultivars, unopened blossoms and unpollinated vines, rhetoric around bombings.

Favorite poems - "Certain Outlines Can Only Be Imagined", "In the Tradition of Women Who've Blessed Me to Transfer These Virtues", & "Yonder"

(4.5) (thank you to NetGalley and Tin House for this e-arc!)

[Ashley Hana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the bigger picture of this collection, but honestly, most of the time I could barely understand the meaning of a singular sentence. But that could very well be a me problem.

[Meaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, beautiful poetry.

My favorites from the collection:
-"To someone who's heard I love you too many times" beginning with "Another way of saying"
-"Disagreeable Aspects of Hyphenation"
-"Tonight, a Woman"
-"To someone who's said I love you too many times"
-"More Than Half of Americans Can't Name an Asian American"
-"Listening to the Storm, Still Distant vs. Specific Rain on the Banana Leaves"
-"During the Storm, the City Reassures Me"
-"In Fairy Tales Disobedience Helps You Travel"
-"Wading into the River Beneath the Interstate"
-"After Florida's Six-Week Abortion Ban Takes Effect"
-"Warheads"
-"If You Aren't Explicit, They'll Say You Never Mentioned the War"
-"Toyo"

[Renee Godding · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Beloved, if I titled this poem
My Mothers America, would it contain her mother? And how long
before you know the urgency of this sentence is lost”

Maybe the Body is a debut poetry collection by Filipino-American author Asa Drake, that centers themes of belonging, nature-vs-nurture and body, alongside undertones of political dissonance and predator-prey-dynamics in our everyday lives.
I was positively surprised with how much this collection resonated with me, as often “prose-poetry” is hit or miss for me. That being said: thematically, this was straight up my alley. I loved the imagery and metaphors the author chose to build this collection on, and really appreciated how her language flowed, despite not adhering to a classical metrum or rhyme.

I personally don’t know enough about the authors background (my ARC didn’t include the acknowledgements or author-biography yet) to say for sure if this was autobiographical in any way. I have to say that - especially in its themes of displacement, familial lineage and cultural heritage – it felt deeply authentic and personal, in a way that made me appreciate the poems even more. Overall I’d highly recommend this collection to anyone, but especially those familiar with the themes of cultural in-between-ness and dissonance that seem more and more relevant every day. Some of these lines will live rent-free in my mind for quite a while.

Some of my personal favourite poems include:
- Yonder
- To someone who’s heard, I love you, too many times (in all its iterations and variations)
- I’m interested in how animals teach us pleasure

As a final note: I think it’s worth crediting the cover-artist for the edition too, as they’ve done a fantastic job of capturing the nature of this collection in a visual. It’s vibrant and provocative, bright pink and sweet-looking on the surface, but has a distinctive feeling of tension and unease with the bunny and the snake (both recurrent motifs in the collection). Perfect example of form matching content here!

Many thanks to Tin House Press through Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been eager to read more poetry this year so I was excited to read Maybe the Body by Asa Drake and I really enjoyed these poems! I really liked the focus on love and her mixed race Filipina/white experiences. I loved these lines in Afternoon in the Cemetery:
“…The Crow, a
movie in which the star is Asian and white. My mother liked to point out which characters I could grow into.” I’m still loving to see that representation. One of my fave poems is (FR)I(E)NDEX which showcases the author’s love for her friends. I liked how the cover ties into the collection as a rabbit is mentioned. Another of my fave poems is Toyo which plays with language. This is a great debut and I’d love to read more poetry from this author in the future.

Thank you to the publisher via NetGalley for my free review copy!

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It's so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in."

a beautifully written collection concerned with histories, language, love, & the world we live in (both political and ecological). i really like the narrative sections (one excerpted above) which place the poems in both a time and a space of mind. there is a lot here on the middle-ness of being between cultures & language & more. the poems are very of the moment (like searching your house on Zillow) but with a timelessness as well that i think is hard to pull off.

a good collection to read if you also stay up pondering about your place in the world.

thanks to netgalley for the arc!

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's something comforting in these words. For a debut, this is really strong and I can't wait to read more of their work. It's very intimate.

Thanks for the ARC

[Tamzen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the Body is the debut poetry collection of Asa Drake. Through these poems, she hits on themes of identity, ecology, location, and family, but I never felt fully compelled by the work. There was somewhat a lack of cohesion even though the themes were throughout the collection. And perhaps the lack was felt because some of the poems were so metaphorical-leaning that it was very hard to find what the meaning actually was. Pretty words are half the battle, the crux is infusing actual meaning into them. For a bit I thought, maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough about each poem? But after a while and rereading and trying to place some context, I still was coming up short. And though I'm sure I am uninformed on plenty of things in this collection, a poem should still have something a person can latch onto.

For all that criticism, I really enjoyed when Drake brought animals and nature into the mix. For instance, birds are brought up often, and the idea that their lives are transient and they don't fully take up residence or citizenship anywhere is really poignant beside the idea of humanity not being that same way due to border and nationality labels. Drake is biracial Filipina and white, and when she pulls together her identity and concepts like that, it is very interesting!

In conclusion, I liked it fine, but I wanted to like it more. Poetry is one of the even more subjective literatures, and this time, it just didn't hit *as* hard as it could have. This one would still be worth the time to read though!

Thanks to Netgalley and Tin House for the e-ARC!

[gasbolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a heartachingly beautiful collection of poems.

I see everyone quoting "it's so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in", but I think what hit me the hardest was "everything about me is an affect of failed language", and, most of all, "To a friend, I admit, given a second opportunity I’d record all my English in italics. A formal decentering to ensure my mother’s speech is roman". I don't know what it's like to be a mixed race person in the united states, but I do know about being a white latina in the united kingdom. I do know about losing your language and leaving your family, your mother, about having your name mispronounced mispelled misheard, reinvented to fit into their mouths, as you smile and accept. I know about "being lucky".

"A co-worker asks if I am happy here
and I say it's different for me.
Belonging demands being caught            in one another’s borders."

The thing about poetry is that being seen by it can be at once a joyous and harrowing experience. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy, and we need it more than ever.


Thank you to Tin House at Zando for the arc, and for Asa Drake for having the language.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I feel like I have been waiting a long time to be wowed this way again by a contemporary poetry collection, and finally, one delivered! The poems are superbly crafted on a line level, but also cohesive across the breadth of structures and linked themes. I am always a sucker for a poem series (as in, the same title used with several poems). These poems are modern and timely, and actually have something coherent to say about politics and identity. And what an evocative cover!

I want to go home, which is a concession—home isn't here. The opposite of
possibility, to give up possession. I often think I am losing ground.

-from "2" section opener

[Lauren Oertel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delight to receive an early copy of this new poetry collection. The cover beckoned me, and the energy of the poems kept me locked in the pages. This book hums and shimmers with the tensions between the past/present/future, the human/animal kingdoms, and the personal/political.

The voice in these poems demands attention, while many of the lines and images linger after reading.

I marked numerous passages throughout these pages. Here are some of my favorites:

“When I feed the animals / the rabbit stands up / so straight she falls over. / That is the part I want / you to know. We are / that kind of animal.”

“Light breaks the window. You don’t recognize light / as a hard hitter. Moonlight moonlighting as a meteorite… My house moonlights / as a more expensive house online.”

“If you rest your hand above your heart, it’s harder to hate your body.”

“Belonging demands being caught in one another’s borders.”

“I don’t want to impress people. I want to survive them.”

Congrats to the author and thank you to Tin House for the advanced copy of this one. I look forward to reading more from Asa Drake!

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am admittedly not an avid reader of poetry. And although I did not fully understand each beautiful and vividly written poem in Asa Drake’s debut collection, Maybe The Body, I did enjoy the challenge of the reading experience. The overall thread of this collection is a portrayal of how the body shows its lifetime of experiences, both lived and inherited. This collection is heavily layered with topical themes of identity, family, immigration, and politics, to name a few. I found the notes at the end of the collection to be particularly helpful in gaining greater insight into each poem. I read this collection on my Kindle, but I would recommend picking up a print copy so that you can page back and forth between each poem and its accompanying notes located at the end of the book. Some of the poems I enjoyed most were Abundance, Maybe The Body Is A Loved One, Afternoon In The Cemetery, Assemble The Mockingbird, and Toyo.

This poignant collection of poetry will be a compelling read for lovers and experienced readers of poetry, especially those who enjoy reading about multigenerational family connections across countries, and how those relationships and the landscapes upon which they have formed, departed from, and traveled to mold the individual.

Thank you NetGalley and Zando Projects for providing me with an ARC of Maybe The Body which gave me the opportunity to voluntarily share my thoughts.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really beautifully written debut from Asa Drake. These poems are inventive, inquisitive, and rich with language that forces you to pay attention.

I occasionally thought some poems were a bit abstract, and wouldn’t recommend this to a new poetry reader. But I’d definitely suggest this for seasoned readers of the genre.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love poetry and I enjoyed the insights and perspectives that this collection brought. It felt real and relative to the political climate that we are currently living in while also giving a voice to the feelings and experiences of the author.

[LibrarianPicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this incredible collection of poems. Contemporary in its topics and themes. I normally do not read a lot of poetry (tbh I usually need it explained to me) but this book captured my heart. My eyes filled with tears on more than one occasion. Highly recommend.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

To me poetry invokes something inside of me, when I connect to the words it’s because I feel close to them, I didn’t feel that with this one. I don’t know if it was the writing style or something else but I just wasn’t connecting to the words. It has the ability of feeling real, there’s something there, but it wasn’t there for me. Maybe someone else will connect more with this work.

[Taylor Portela · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most pleasurable reads — from the first page, the speaker and poems and poet know exactly what they’re doing. The candor, the confidence. Also a gorgeous exploration of family history, self, place, language. Incredible.

[pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

from the poem, “In the Tradition of Women Who’ve Blessed Me to Transfer Their Virtues,”

I give you what I don’t have.
Strawberries in the mouths of birds.

Unopened pomegranate blossoms
devoured by ants. Fruit dropped

from unpollinated vines. Tell me
the last time a flower wasn’t the shortcut

to desire. One year in the middle
of my life I asked, How full do I want to be?

Like hunger in the years before,
I asked fullness to be endless.”

Asa Drake’s poetry book, MAYBE THE BODY is sooo good y’all! 💜

A debut that just gives, gives, and gives. First time I picked it up, I nearly finished it in one sitting! I had to backtrack to underline & tab up my favorites and then proceeded to finish up… only to then get right back to the start, to further highlight even more! loved writing them in my journal too! ✍🏽✨

I loved the “To someone who’s heard I love you too many times” poems — they’re connected not only by title but also in the way that they build on what the last one mentioned. 🌟

I loved the “(Fr)i(e)ndex” towards the end of the book where the poet’s favorite lines from conversations with friends were attributed and given credit 🥰

Some of my favorite lines:

“We are alive in an era of firsts we don’t recognize…”

“love / refracted between us to make everyone in the room more beautiful.” 💓

“Maybe the best omen / for moderation is the thing we love pinning us down.”

“The heart / is a list of demands / I answer one by one.”

“I want to name the part of me / which denotes how long it has been / since I left home.”

“I’d be kinder / if I felt more confident in my own ability to move quickly.”

“I have not learned to convey / anything more than meaning, and I think / when she says I never learned language / she worries I will be lonely.”

“I want to live where most people love me.” 🥺

“Credibility demands I stay in love.”

“I don’t want to impress people, // I want to survive them…”

“Yes, I // feel shame but not regret.” ❣️

[Maddie]

I’m sure it was a me problem, but the vast majority of this was completely intangible to me

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book oscillated between 1 star and 5 stars for me; at times a little difficult to comprehend and rather confusing and at others completely engrossing and heart wrenching. I’ve settled on 4 in the end because as it turns out I enjoy writing that gives me headaches.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, thought provoking, book of poems.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous book on love, holding, language, the US South, and diasporic inheritances / ruptures. What I love most about Asa's voice in this book is its ability to unapologetically withhold lucidity or direct access with ease, especially in context to the vexed and contradictory terrain of the body and its many histories, its secrets.

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Asa Drake's Maybe the Body explores themes of imminent violence, colonialism, conquest, and love. in a way, love is a conquest over the body, an attempt to control or master it. there's tenderness in here too, care and preservation of family history. a timely collection for what we are experiencing in the world.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the exceptionally good fortune to receive an advance copy of Maybe the Body from Tin House; this is a book I've been anticipating since reading Asa Drake's chapbook One Way to Listen, and I find Drake's continued growth and development as a poet delightful. Maybe the Body is filled with complex, discursive poems that feel dialogic in nature. This is an impressive feat, given the one-sided (or transmissional) reality of the relationship between poet and reader, but such is Drake's deftness with diction that the poems feel welcoming and conversational, even when considering the complicated and difficult realities of intergenerational experience with regime change, immigration, forced estrangement, and distance. Drake never foregoes the humanity of those about whom she writes; there's nothing reductive or sentimental in her portrayal of familial history, and the collection is incredibly rich and resonant because of that commitment. I'm looking forward to repeatedly returning to this collection and deepening my engagement with it. These poems will reward that attention.

[Jeannie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It is possible what belongs to me doesn’t dictate where I belong"

The cover of this poetry collection is stunning and so is Drake's prose, but I must also admit that I didn't feel very connected to much of the writing (some metaphors went straight over my head?). I might just not be the target audience.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not interested in making myself legible or accessible to others. I try to write my poems as clearly as possible for myself. I’m the only person that I have to make comfortable.

Asa Drake in an interview found at
https://www.onlypoems.com/interviews/...

Startling and original, upon first reading I was not always sure I understood these poems, but knew I was being taken on a journey into another’s soul. Identity, heritage, the nature of love and being loved, are explored in the poems. The more I read them, the more they spoke to me.

Yonder by Asa Drake
Light breaks the window. You don’t recognize light
as a hard hitter. Moonlight moonlighting as meteorite,
curtain rod come loose, cabinet collapsed at dawn, a sign
you must go out into the world, received by the reproduction
of gardenias and orange blossoms hungry for visitors.
Love bends the balcony in water weight. Once,
a neighbor cried out for help, collapsed under the collapsed
trellis of passion flowers. Maybe the best omen
for moderation is the thing we love pinning us down.
I check the value of my house on Zillow. My house moonlights
as a more expensive house online. Even the comfort of numbers
scares me. Then there is the comfort that the end of us isn’t the end.

“You must go out into the world,” Drake writes in Yonder, and yet “the thing we love” can collapse and pin us down.

Letter to my Younger Self
by Asa Drake

When I see men digging clay beside the confederate
monument, I want to know if this is where we bury
unspecific history. Make it look easy.

Lately, I worry. Today, I was told
most mixed-race women die in fiction, which implies
that the living version of myself is difficult

for others to imagine. Today a crossing light,
swallowed by the rainy season, joined the number
of things I’ve touched that fall into sinkholes. All space

I didn’t know I was risking. I worry a great deal
about the unimportant ways you busy your hands.
Get thee to a dry cleaner, my love.

Let someone else play human. The woman behind me
can’t stand to look. Who could do that everyday, she says,
like each night I boil moths myself and spin silk.

As a Filipina/white poet she explores her heritage and how she is marginalized by white culture. “I am where I come from,” Drake writes about being mistaken for a waitress while in a restaurant celebrating.

I appreciated the Notes with sources and inspirations for the poems.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.