For National Poetry Month, we asked Tsahai Makeda to sit down with Asa Drake, whose debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, was released on February 24, 2026, from Tin House.
This is their conversation.
Tsahai Makeda: The collection is warm and super inviting and your language is rich and lush and beautiful in it. Tell me a bit about it. Where did it come from, the inspiration for the poems, and how long it took you to get this complete body of work together?
Asa Drake: Where did it come from? Oh, that’s such a hard question. I think this is true for a lot of debut poets, but I feel like I’ve been working on this book forever. The earliest poems in the collection are probably published from 2018, which isn’t that long ago, but some of the poems are second attempts of drafts that I made in 2010. It’s been a lot of me learning about myself and about my own poetic practice, the different techniques and forms and conversations that I want to be a part of and kind of returning to poems that I loved but didn’t quite engage in the way that I had hoped that they would. I don’t think my obsessions have changed too greatly over the years, but I’ve learned so much about my own process and the kind of play that I want to do and the way I think about audience and access have changed a lot. That meant a lot to me that you said that you found the collection warm and inviting because when I was talking with my editor, Lisa, and going through the almost final version of the book, we had a lot of conversations about how much I wanted to let people in and who I wanted to let in. I think those conversations made it easier for me to return to poems that I hadn’t found a way to work around in the years before that. And a lot of that’s just a matter of admitting that so much work is done, particularly in poetry, in my early drafts, to try and explain who I am and where I am. At some point in the book, I couldn’t just keep up that energy and I decided to just decide, what if I assumed that I was a known entity? What if I assumed that I wasn’t strange to someone else? And that made it so much easier to write the collection.
TM: I love that. I love how in the collection, the poems all speak to a certain aspect of self, and others, and then brings it all in and makes the reader think about, what does home and place mean to me? Things that you wouldn’t even consider like this, could mean that. In, “I’m Interested In How Animals Teach Us Pleasure”, the opening line, I had to sit with it for a minute because it is strong; Sometimes the thing that may destroy your home sings. I love that song too. At first, we can think about it really philosophically and metaphorically, and then I’m like, oh, my woodpecker.
AD: It’s even rats. They sing to their young. It’s an awful thing for our house, but wonderful things in the world, right?
TM: Yep. So gorgeous. So absolutely gorgeous. On that note, the work does explore this idea of home being both external, a physical thing; we can see, feel, touch, and internal to us just as beings in the world. Where did you see this most in your life, directly and indirectly? This idea of home as a physical place, but home as me and my people, as you were writing the collection.
AD: You know, home has always been a sticky issue for me. I grew up in the South. I grew up in a small town of 2000 people. Everyone knew my name, everyone knew my parents, my parents’ parents. I don’t know that I’d ever lived in a place I could come home to and be recognized as someone who belonged. And I doubt that I ever will know such a place. Even living in a place where everyone could name generations of my relatives, visiting family in the Philippines, it wasn’t the same as having a lineage people recognize. It isn’t the same as being considered someone who belongs, in my experience. I think part of this is also like a history of the United States, of where there’s no way to prove belonging in the United States, which is a country built on a history of exclusion, which I’m sure we can both testify to in different degrees and different experiences. And yet, what surprises me most, though, is that there are places and there are things and there are people to whom I can offer recognition and whom I can make feel at home. And the idea that I can make someone at home in a place that I feel uncertain about my own belonging has always been a really powerful thing to me.
TM: That’s beautiful. That kind of answers the next question that I have, how did particular relationships to people and places impact the speaker’s view on what makes a thing feel like or be home? And you’ve answered that. Now, I would have prefaced that question with, I never assume that the speaker and the author are the same person, but I feel comfortable in saying that it’s you. These are your experiences and feelings about these experiences.
AD: Yeah, I know that some people have a speaker who’s farther afield from themselves, but I always joke that I’m not the most creative person. I’m good at observing, good at paying attention, but I don’t know if I could make a world from scratch.
TM: You can. You just gotta sit with it. Sit with it a little bit and let it marinate. You can build a home from your imagination. Speaking of homes, some of these poems in the collection did have original homes in some pretty notable journals prior to making their final home here. What was your process like in selecting which pieces? The process in which you said this piece belongs in Maybe The Body and this piece doesn’t? What did that look like for you?
AD: Oh, that was hard. I would even say that at some point, I realized there were two versions of myself. There was a version of myself that is very much tied to my experience of being a librarian, of wanting to accommodate others, wanting to be warm and welcoming, but also trying to gauge my own relationship to others in these circumstances. And then there’s a version of me that’s really salty and sour and who I have to kind of keep in check, so to speak. These different versions became different books. I think that gave me more permission because I had these two different versions and perspectives of the South and the world and it let me let go of poems that no longer felt in play or in motion to me, even if they had been well received by editors. And it also let me say that not everything has to be in one collection. I think that gave me just a lot more ease in considering what I want for this book and what I want for the next book. For me, it’s much more important that the poems in a collection explore some sort of unanswered question or engage in some sort of experiment, almost like a mathematical proof. I love the idea that we have these set of givens and that we explore different theories with them. And that works for me in a poem book, kind of. The other thing I thought of is that a book has to exist for such a long time, that I think it’s a huge risk to include anything that I am already starting to lose excitement for. So if I found myself already finding a poem a little distant or no longer in place, so to speak, it’s often one that I would cycle out in favor of new work. And I will say so much of this book was written after it was accepted by Tin House. I had like three months or so to edit and I mostly did generative edits. I think the sense of permission I had of knowing that it had a home, let me take more risk and let me favor new poems and new work rather than work that I may have put at the front of the book to say, alright, this has the gold star of approval from others and I hope you’ll accept it. I no longer needed that.
TM: I love that for the work. So, in that same vein, do you have another collection in the same thematic avenue as this or are you going to pivot?
AD: I have a second book coming out with Noemi Press in October, actually, called Beauty Talk. It does keep some of the mix of prose and lyrical elements. There’s a long prose essay that’s interrupted by poems, but it’s one that plays a lot more. I think that in Maybe The Body, I’m very closely tied to this conversation that I have with my mother and with my mother’s relatives, particularly my Tita Nena in the Philippines, my uncle Egai, and just what that experience of diaspora feels like across different geographies and different borders. And then Beauty Talk is a really strange thing where I talked to a friend about how I never really engage with the white side of my family, that it’s something that I have a harder time feeling entry into. And he just said, “Well, what, what would that look like? What would it look like for you to try and claim that heritage and that inheritance?” That inheritance is very much a real inheritance tied to real land and this kind of heirs’ land, which can only be divided among family, but that I know I’ll never be a part of. So the book took the place of a kind of physical inheritance, it was a way of me letting go of something that I wasn’t quite sure of how I could partake of it. And while also claiming these are the parts that are definitely still mine. And especially with my father’s history as a model and also the way that he thinks of beauty and how, more than anything, of a family that he had. That’s the part that he held very close to me and that he wanted me to have in conversation with him. It became a very strange and intimate conversation of beauty advice, but also ways people interact with the world and imagine how I interact with the world, that I’m a little scared to put out and publish, but I also really loved writing.
TM: The beauty in the work, who you are, I feel like will shine through in the writing.
AD Thank you.
TM: Let’s pivot and talk a little bit about you and the writing practice. You are a teaching artist, yes?
AD Yes, I host workshops now for most of my bread and butter, creative writing workshops, usually generative workshops, and writing book reviews and craft essays too.
TM: How do you balance your work life? Because even though it’s in the creative arts and in the lane of the thing that you do personally, how do you balance that work with your own creative writing life?
AD Oh, it’s still fairly new to me. I think I started doing workshops, maybe four years ago, and I started hosting poetry workshops as a teaching artist to transition away from my position as a reference librarian, which I loved, but it was a kind of customer service which instilled a specific kind of language into my day-to-day life. I wonder if this is true for other professions, but there’s a kind of jargon that you get so used to saying that it becomes second nature, and I didn’t want that to be the first language that I reached for. It was the structure I found really difficult to shake off at my writing desk. So I started building these classes over a couple years before I felt comfortable fully making the leap into being a teaching artist. And I, even now, do miss the stability of a salaried position. Because of where I was in the writing process and because of the flexibility I needed to focus on my writing, I knew that I needed to step away. One of the things I’m very careful about with the workshops that I do now, freelance, is just making sure that I don’t host more than one at a time. And that I make sure that I leave myself a little breathing room because during those workshops, I am very much engaged in providing feedback and thinking about different practices my students might be picking up. But I want to make sure that I have the time to step away and also that I give myself a little bit of time to accept opportunities for residencies and periods of prolonged focus, which was the whole point of leaving the salaried work position in the first place. I think always keeping that in mind, all right, why did we make this decision? Keeping that in the forefront has been really important and scheduling around core time slots that I need. And it’s probably worth mentioning that this kind of shift of labor is something that I was only able to do because I do live in a really rural area. I’d had several years to save funds with my partner while planning this transition from the library. And I still have a lot of support from my colleagues from my local library too. So there are a lot of things that made this something I could do.
TM: Something super easy. That’s good to hear as a working artist. But you’ve cultivated the way that you show up to work, in a capitalistic society, because we live on earth, in America, and we need money to survive.
AD We do!
TM: But you’ve made it in a way that it doesn’t interrupt your creative life and I think that’s a goal for most of us writers. That’s probably why a lot of us teach at certain different levels. I’m K-12 right now and it really resonated with me what you said about the language of that entity not seeping into my creative space. So I’ve kind of come up with a way to keep it separate-separate, as separate as I can in my mind, so it doesn’t infiltrate my work until I no longer have to do that kind of work, to do my kind of work.
AD It’s funny, but some of the language cues still stick with me where I have trouble using a negative in a sentence because I still think, I don’t say don’t run. I say walk, please. And that kind of sensibility, it’s still in my poetry, so when I use a ‘don’t’ or a negation of a word, it’s a very active choice because I’ve been conditioned to not use this language with other people.
TM: Oh, that’s wonderful. It really brings up for me, what have I learned in being a K through 12 teacher? I teach high school, but just in reprimand, we don’t negative speak, we use positive praise even for negative behavior. It’s not, “Sit down on the chair,” it’s, “Thank you for paying attention to me.” But are you even picking up that I’m telling you to sit down so we can work?
AD And then the problem, you can’t say sit down in words, you can, but like, I’m giving myself that permission.
TM: So the next question, it might feel the same, but not really, because what I’m looking for is a little bit more specific. What does your writing practice actually look like? And by this, I mean, are you a planner or are you a pantser? Do you sit down at a specific time every day and give yourself to the writing, or do you just go to it as it comes to you?
AD You know I’m not someone who did sports growing up but I really believe in the sports superstitions of you pay attention to what works and you continue to do the thing that works.
TM: Love that.
AD Whenever I’m able to write for a good session, I take notes of what I did right before? Was there something I ate? Did I have a certain kind of tea? Did I talk to a particular person? Did I go on a run this morning? And I’ll keep notes of that and say alright, I need to get some writing done. I have some time available this week. I’m going to follow these same practices and see if that conjures the ability to do it again. For me, some of these are fruitful conversations with friends online or over the phone. I really love this Frank O’Hara quote that says that, “A poem could just as easily be a phone call,” and I think that something about that is true. Like the urgency of needing to express ourselves to someone else leads to strong poems. I’m also someone who I really likes voice to text. Not because of capturing the typing on the phone, but I think that when I do voice to text, I’m much freer with the language that I use. And so I’ll surprise myself in a way that I might not if I was typing. And then I also do a lot of essay writing whenever I can. I’m a very slow reader, but I think that my creative writing is strengthened by my critical writing. I’ll try to write a few critical essays or book reviews every season to support and celebrate other poets, but writing these reviews allow me to enter a conversation that I might otherwise struggle to be a part of. I’m a little shy. I’m someone who I don’t think I could interview another writer. But I have so many questions about what a poem can do and reviews for me mean sifting through the information that writers make available through their books and publications, even like Instagram posts, to understand how their choices or poetic practice might offer ground for future research for me. I mean, it’s a little selfish but then it’s my way of navigating contemporary poetry and understanding where my own work might fit in, because I’m able to pay attention to others who might be asking similar questions and then bring those questions back to the work. So often if I find that I’m not writing poems, I’ll try to write an essay. Just if I can’t do one thing, I’ll shift to another and often I’ll just shift right back just based on what I can get myself focused on.
TM: I’m gonna steal one of the things that you said about your practice because it didn’t dawn on me to do that, but you pay attention to what you’ve done before, like when you’re in a really good session, you go back and see what was I doing before I got here? What was I eating, drinking, listening to? And in saying that, I really thought about music as a big opening space of creativity for me and I’ve never paid attention to it like that before, and now I will. Thank you for that.
AD And now you have a good reason to listen to music for two hours and know that this is actually part of you doing the work.
TM: Right! I love that for us writers. Now can you tell us a little bit about your journey to publication. Some of these poems in the collection got started as early as 2010. What was it like going from draft, to this is a full body of work, to querying and agenting, to now we have a physical book in the world?
AD This is a funny thing to say, but I keep a lot of spreadsheets, and I looked back recently and it was expensive. And I said that because like many debut poets, I spent a lot on contests. There aren’t a lot of free opportunities or open submission periods, especially when you’re putting out your first book, and the content model really dominates the landscape. I was just looking back and saying, you know, I think I saved like $1000 last year not applying to contests.
TM: Wow.
AD And that said, this particular book actually isn’t from the contest model, though. What I would do is whenever I was a finalist for an award, I’d use that as a reason to update editors that I might have been in contact with who had seen earlier versions of the manuscript and expressed interest. It was my way of finding an excuse to reach out and be a little brave and say that I might have something new to offer. I think what surprised me most was how the book changed between that acceptance and the publication. I had a few months that were just extremely generative and that involved quite a bit. Part of it was writing new poems and part of it was my editor asked for me to just collect everything from the cutting room floor. If there was something that narratively fit, even if I was unsure of the poem, to not worry about what poem was best but what poems might bring something different and different nuance. When I got rid of the sense of something being best, it opened a lot of opportunities for me to write different and weirder poems that I really love within the book. I think there’s an erasure poem that came out of that process. And the string of sonnet-like poems with the same, I Love You title, all of those were written except for maybe the first two or three, during that period between acceptance and publication.
TM: “More than half of Americans can’t name an Asian American.” That’s what you pulled to create the erasure one. I love these.
AD It’s a little cheeky, but I wasn’t sure, and I’ll admit that it erases and erases, but I actually add in an article in the last one to make it work, and I was like, I don’t know if this is formally sound, but I really enjoyed the poem and the process and that was enough to keep it for the book. I knew I had all these other poems that I was sure of and that it was okay to give myself permission for something I just loved.
TM: Yeah, it’s fabulous. I love it.
AD Thank you.
TM: You’re welcome. When did you know you were a writer? What brought you to the pen?
AD I don’t know if I ever knew for sure that I was a writer. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve always been a reluctant reader. And I blamed that reluctance on work that so rarely centered me or centered a version of the world that I can recognize. I suppose I write out of love for this version of the world and in spite of more popular versions of the world that made me feel foreign. I don’t know if spite is a good reason to be a writer, but it was enough to say that I had seen all these other versions, and I just thought it was worth it to offer this compliment for a fuller version of the world.
TM:What are you most looking forward to once this collection is officially out in the world?
AD I’m going to be glad to just write without having any expectations. For the past year, with both books kind of in production or in the process of going towards production, anything that I wrote was toward a space that needed to be filled in the book. And I think that right now what I really love is not having to write towards any particular aim or goal, nothing has to fill a collection. And as a result, I’m writing poems that might just be one off, they don’t lead to anything else. I am writing short stories for fun that are awful, I don’t think I’ll show them to the public, but I really enjoy them. I can allow myself to be a novice again and just try different things without anyone expecting them to be good, and that’s really freeing.
TM: It is freeing and it’s really good for the creative self. It’s so good for our writing to just be able to write something and you’re like, ooh, I love this while you’re writing it and then go back and be like, that is trash, but it felt good to get out, right?
AD Trash is important. It is part of the process.
TM: Absolutely. 100%. What’s the last book that you read for fun and the last book you read for craft, for work?
AD I also went to AWP, and I picked up bell hook’s Black Looks: Race and Representation because I needed to read Eating the Other, to prepare for a panel that I was on. I love hooks’s essays and how these are essays that legitimize personal experiences, a necessary field research to supplement academic arguments that are often very biased and pre-existing arguments that might fail some aspect of the real world. But then while I was at the conference, I got to pick up Renee Gladman’s Theory For Moving Houses, which came with a full color figure. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gladman’s work, but there are these beautiful figures that sometimes have plants for sentences particularly. And I don’t want to call them illustrations because I think that doesn’t fully capture the nature of the work. But I never got to see these in full color and I was like, all right, this book comes with a full color version, I’m gonna take it. I just love a loose insert in the book. I was that kid who always wanted but never got the books that had the locket or the necklace in it and for me, the loose paper, that’s it. That’s it for me.
TM: That’s feeding the little girl Asa, the eight-year-old Asa. I love that for her. Okay, what’s one thing that you do to recharge and unwind? I know you mentioned gardening earlier, so I don’t know if that’s in that purview.
AD It really is. I haven’t gone to the garden this past fall because I’ve been so busy, so I was really excited to do it this spring. I love plants. I love tending to them. I love eating them. The whole process is such a luxury to see through from beginning to end. And I just have a lot of pride in getting my roses and orchids to bloom year after year and I think the confidence from that carries over to other forms of making. But I think that any project where I don’t expect to finish it in one sitting is helpful. Recognizing the ongoing work of a process or art is just something really useful to me when I’m going back to the page.
TM: It’s like home, right? Your garden is home.
AD Yeah, it’s definitely like a safe space and it’s a way to play. Central Florida is a beautiful place with very divided politics at the moment and there are people who make me feel that I fit right in and there are people who definitely want to challenge that and somehow, having a very visible handprint on my little area of the block makes a big difference to me.
TM: What’s a wisdom that you’ve learned from your journey in writing and publishing that you can share with emerging writers?
AD Mentors are helpful, and I know we all want to sign up for a class with our favorite writer, but it’s our peers who we’ll write alongside our whole lives. And when you go to workshops, when you go to conferences, keep in touch with the writers you admire in your cohort, talk to other people in the audience. These are the people who will exchange manuscripts with you. And when you can, support one another. I love the people who are our teachers and the people who have helped teach us so much craft, but we’ll develop those ideas on craft within our own cohorts and just being there for one another is so important.
TM: That’s really good advice. One of my favorite writing spaces to be is the Kenyon Review Writers Retreat. I was there last summer and one of my friends from my ‘25 cohort and I were sitting at a panel together at AWP just this past week. It was the Beyond the Debut panel and Cleyvis Natera spoke on something she does that’s a huge part of her writing process and that she’s been doing since she started writing. She has what she calls a generative buddy. So my friend, Megan, and I, gave each other a knowing stare because this was something we wanted to do. A generative buddy is just about the work. You get on a call and these are the things you talk about, and these things only; what is your goal for the week? Did you hit the goal? What’s your goal for next week or next month? There’s no chit-chat. Those calls are just about work and she said that this was how she wrote her first book. Just having that person to be accountable and vice versa for her friend. A lot of times we look to mentors and the people that are already there, but it’s the people that’s in the same space as you, career-wise, that’s going to hold your hand as you both move up.
AD Yes, yes. I mean, there are incredible instructors that I’ve had, but I’m not sending them a poem at 6AM that I read last night. That’s gonna be a friend I send it to, someone who’s like on my own level.
TM: Yeah, that’s really, really good advice. Thank you for that. Last, but not least, what is coming next for you and anything you’re working on that you can share with us? Now, you do have another book coming out in October. So give a little piece of that and then anything else that you are working on currently beyond that, that you can share.
AD It’s been a while since I’ve done the elevator pitch for Beauty Talk, which I kind of like, because it means that I’ve always thought of it in such expansive ways. You can tell that I’m nervous about this one. This one’s my baby right now, and I just want everything to be right when I talk about it. Beauty Talk is a project that really started with me talking to a friend and this was something that was done kind of as a joke within a group chat that grew into its own book. I wanted to address the possibility or impossibility about talking about beauty in America without addressing whiteness. The sense of what is beautiful and what is white are horribly linked in the US. And it was an act that necessarily meant addressing my mixed race identity, talking about labor and ecology, and it also just interesting biographical facts about my own family that I hadn’t really spent a lot of time with. My father was a 1970’s camel cigarette man. I had just started having these correspondences with my half siblings who are older than my mother. They are like in their late 60’s, I think. And then I grew up with this historical map of the Mouzon family that I have heard about but never looked at and just looking at the language that was on that map became something that really fueled this project.
TM: I’m excited for that to come out.
AD I’m nervous, but excited about it. I really love it. Almost all of the poems for that were written in 2024. There are a few that I borrowed from early versions of Beauty Talk, but almost all of that is really new and very close to my heart. It makes me a little nervous that the poems are just now getting to publication and to different journals. It feels like it’s like all out there and I love that. It’s very exciting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, she 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 poems have been published with The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, and The Georgia Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Tsahai Makeda is a Jamaican-American writer who writes about the human experience and its impact on one’s sense of self in the world. When not writing, she is reading or knitting. She earned her BA in English, minor in Philosophy, from The State University of New York at New Paltz and her MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches workshops at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and has received support for her work from The Center for Black Fiction and The Kenyon Review. She received The Caribbean Writer’s 2023 Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for her short story, ‘For Generations’. Her work appears in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Women Who Submit, Epiphany, Breadcrumbs, REWRITE London, The Caribbean Writer, & Prairie Schooner. She’s recently finished writing her memoir and is in conversations to get it out into the world. She lives at the foot of the Catskills where she writes and reads, and writes some more.