Multiplicity of Belonging
Asa Drake’s Maybe the Body explores belonging, lineage, and love
Maybe the Body by Asa Drake is a fierce and precise debut poetry collection about love, family, memory, and what it means to belong to a place that betrays the bodies it holds. Drawing from her experience as a Filipina and white woman living in the American South, Drake investigates the tension between the intimacy of belonging and the complexities of nationhood, revealing how relationships are shaped by histories of migration, colonialism, and regional identity.
A collection that is delightfully ambitious in its forms, Maybe the Body urges readers toward liminal spaces across lineage and memory: “Remember, America is only one possibility.” As attention and voice move throughout the collection – spanning inquiry into family history, racism and microaggressions, and intersections of time and place – Drake details confrontations with otherness. A coworker invited to the speaker’s home tells her, “There’s nothing special about the food you grew up with.” Magnolias inspire a feeling of guilt. A growing allergy to muscadines transforms the landscape into a distinct mirroring of the bodily rejection the speaker feels.
These recurring Southern images suggest painful estrangement, as the speaker’s attempts to connect are met with rejection that echoes the region’s historical systems of exclusion. Yet despite the persistent experience of displacement and othering, Drake excavates truth with a ferocious level of care.
Drake, who is based in central Florida and serves as associate editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, refuses easy binaries, allowing love and grief, tenderness and harm, belonging and otherness to coexist, even within the same relationships. A braided sequence titled “To someone who’s heard I love you too many times” makes this effective in its repetition, often threaded toward the beginning of each numbered section of the collection. Repetition functions less as redundancy here than as love’s insistence on seeking a common definition across generations. The third poem in this sequence acknowledges how recurrence hinders or heals a bloodline.
My mother didn’t want me to repeat
her life. She wanted me to recognize
the possibility of repetition.
The sequence marks the process physically on the page, with the earlier poems presented as blocks of 13-16 lines and the final poem collapsing inherited and found language into the same visual field via brackets. This combination creates an unidentifiable space and a distinct final line, a truth emerging after so much time spent in the preceding structure: “Everything you say / timing and intimacy have shaped.”
A generous and deeply, introspectively lyrical debut, Maybe the Body shows readers a way to navigate the intersection of home, place, and beloved with the care and grief love requires. As Drake writes in “Wading into the River Beneath the Interstate”:
After Eden, everyone goes home.
To plant seeds. To say we love the unrelenting
aspects of the world and carry them with us
into its aftermath, which is full of potential.
You are rebuilding the garden someone taught you
to love.
A lyrical presence sustains the collection, and when there is nothing left that fragrant language can offer the speaker navigating the realities of diasporic experience in “I’m Interested in How Animals Teach Us Pleasure,” Drake instead wields the lyric’s clarity and directness: “Sometimes the thing that may destroy your home sings. I love that song too.”
sam long (they/them) is a poet, songwriter, and educator living in Nashville. They received their M.F.A. from Randolph College, where they served as a poetry reader for the literary magazine Revolute. sam is a member of the Authors Guild and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and their work has been published in American Songwriter Magazine, root & branch literary magazine, among others. They have been named “One to Watch” by the Nashville Songwriters Association and selected as a 2026 Allies in Arts workshop recipient.
