Asa Drake is a Central Florida-based poet who was a 2024 National Poetry Series finalist. She also is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, and Idyllwild Arts. Her debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, will be published by Tin House on February 24, 2026 and it is now available for pre-order.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover, which was designed by Beth Steidle, along with a Q&A with Asa Drake about how this cover for the collection that explores the lineage and future lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance was created.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
When Maybe the Body was a work in progress I used to illustrate little “covers” to imagine how different motifs might come together. I still have an eight page zine I made of different recurring images within the collection. One has bunny ears sketched to be mountain peaks in a landscape, so the rabbit has always been part of my dream cover.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Alyssa Ogi and Beth Steidle were really generous in our initial conversation which was as much about central themes as it was about important touchstones that enabled me to write the book. Maybe the Body frequently discusses labor–its costs and its constraints–and I wanted a cover that allowed me to be work-shy and embrace the richness of the “natural” world. I told Beth that I wanted floral notes but also a little sugar and a little salt.
This final cover is very similar to the first version Beth designed (I should mention there were two other options that were equally amazing and group chat favorites). I think the only change I requested was for the gardenia. The final version more closely resembles the ones in my own garden. It’s a small touch, but so special!
One thing I hadn’t thought of when thinking about the cover was how language might come into play. I was absolutely thrilled by Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s generous reading of my manuscript and how her description of “flora and fury” felt reflected by Beth’s design.
How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?
So many of these poems are about navigating that gap between obligation and desire and how these feelings map onto a sense of place and belonging. In Maybe the Body, I’m frequently writing between landscapes and in correspondence with my family both in the Southeastern United States and in the Philippines. Beth manages to capture this uncomfortable colonial ecotone of plants and creatures that I love but that struggle to coexist. I love how the banana leaves are protected from the domestic rabbit under the bell jar, and I really relish the shine in the snake’s eye. So many of the places I call home are kept safe from one another in this image.
There are so many personal annotations I could share about the cover. For example, I told you about how we fine-tuned the gardenia. Part of why I’m obsessive about flowers is that my great grandmother was a seamstress and she trained my grandmother (I call her Nanay in the text) in embroidery. Nanay couldn’t make a living with embroidery, so she started selling gardenias wrapped in banana leaves (to keep them from browning). My mother always jokes that we exist because of these flowers. I’m so glad that my debut pays special homage to them.