We're delighted to host poet Asa Drake at H&H Books to celebrate Maybe the Body on Sunday, March 1 at 6 PM.
Maybe the Body, Asa's debut collection, has been described as "full of flora and fury" and "an extensive love song of memory, family, self, and the challenges of differentiating one from the other."
Asa will be joined by fellow poets & friends Jimin Seo (OSSIA) and Sara Mae (Phantasmagossip). Each poet will present a short reading, followed by a Q&A and book signing. Copies of all three poets' books will be for sale at the event.
Registration is highly recommended! Tickets are free, but an attendance count helps us organize our space and plan even more events for our community.
About Maybe the Body:
National Poetry Series finalist 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.
"This debut links memory, the Filipino diaspora, and ecological themes in lyric and braided forms as it explores the impact of inheritance, art, and geography."
--Publishers Weekly
"Maybe the Body is a radiant collection, a generous offering full of flora and fury, plums, and caterpillars. These poems are a field of inheritance where language, history, and lineage collide, and in Drake's capable hands, the body becomes both question and altar."
-- Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders and Bite by Bite
About the Poets:
Asa Drake is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Poetry and The Slowdown Podcast.
Sara Mae was raised on the Chesapeake Bay and is the author of Phantasmagossip, which won the Vinyl45 chapbook competition and was published with YesYes Books in spring 2025. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville and write indie music as The Noisy.
Jimin Seo is the author of OSSIA (Changes, 2024) and the forthcoming A-1982. He is Visiting Professor English at Wesleyan University.
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