Asa Drake was a 2024 National Poetry Series finalist and has received 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 poems have been published with The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, and The Georgia Review.
Her debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, explores the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. It is now available from Tin House.
We asked Drake to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her debut book.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I loved Wuthering Heights. This was even before middle school, I’d been introduced to Brontë’s work through the 1939 film adaptation with Merle Oberon. Though she buried the fact, she was white and South Asian. I think having this pointed out to me (by whom, I can’t remember) made a strong impression. I was really insufferable and had several passages memorized. I think my cousins particularly dread this favorite of mine: My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. It felt like I’d been let into a secret about Oberon, that in the film adaptation, perhaps the lead roles are reversed and sheis more Heathcliff than Heathcliff (at least as played by Laurence Olivier).
What book helped you through puberty?
During a critical summer of my tween years, I carried Sentimental Education with me while following my oldest cousin to school in Quezon City. To be honest I don’t remember most of the book, just how I would impose my cousin’s blue and white school uniform on so many of the characters. I remember how Flaubert made me feel less naive at a time when I was incredibly naive. Later that summer there was a coup attempt that lasted all afternoon. On a day I might have gone to the mall, I stayed in and watched the faction’s demands. At the time, it all felt very related–wanting something material on a personal level and suddenly having to recognize collective discord. I don’t think I really understood the ambitions of the book, how Flaubert described,I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation – or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It’s a book I want to revisit with more intentionality, but I still treasure how I was attached to it as an object. Like a friend really.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
So many poetry collections! Growing up, library poetry collections were low on the priority list for new acquisitions. What I could always rely on were western canon–Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman, a collection of 100 “most loved” poems. At some point I had a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s collected works and those were my favorite poems to memorize.
I’d have loved to have read Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters much sooner than I did. Di Prima’s workgives so much permission to write what is necessary and to trust that during that process, you’ll develop a craft and a practice toward the poetics you most need.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I don’t think I can begin to imagine what is good without thinking about time and place. But I’d love a chance to teach Gwendolyn Brooks’ Riot, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee together.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I learn so much from friends, and I feel like the books that guide me most are the books I write alongside. I can’t imagine writing Maybe the Body without having also read early versions of Rhoni Blankenhorn’s Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, Laura Cresté’s In the Good Years, Carolina Hotchandani’s The Book Eaters, Jimin Seo’s Ossia, and Annie Wenstrup’s The Museum of Unnatural Histories. And then there are the books in progress which have influenced my work. I don’t want to share titles in case they change with time, but I love E. Hughes’ second collection even more than their first. And Nicole W. Lee, C. E. Janecek, Sara Mae, and Pamela K. Santos have debut manuscripts which have helped me be more brave in terms of form and content.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Death of the First Idea by Rickey Laurentiis, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, and Extinction Capital of the World by Mariah Rigg. I’m working on new projects and am reading more fiction lately!