Asa Drake (2)

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/asa-drake-poems-dont-have-to-be-honest

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 show more 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. show less

Maybe the Body: Poems by Asa Drake is such a strong debut — intimate, moving, and it left me excited to read more from this author.

The prose is beautiful. There’s a quiet comfort in these words that just settles into your chest. The intimacy of the story really stays with you.

Thanks to Netgalley and Zando Projects for the gifted eARC.