Maybe the Body: Poems

 

Rating: 4 out of 5|Highly recommended as a mentor text for student writing.

My Thoughts:

In honor of Poetry Month, I dove into the debut collection by Filipina poet Asa Drake.

This is a book meant to be read --and re-read--repeatedly. There are lines that stopped me in my tracks, and others so beautifully complex they felt ʻono, "delicious," in their ambiguity, offering a potential for meaning that perhaps even the poet didn't intend. 

As an English teacher, I especially lived how the titles are integral to the poems themselves.  It satisfies my professional pet peeve of students labeling their work "Untitled." For instance, the poem titled:

 "APPARENTLY, MONARCHS WHO EMERGE FROM MY YARD EACH WINTER"         forgo migration./ Like homeland is/ wherever has kept you.

Homeland is 

wherever has kept you. . .

I want to write that poem. I want to chew on that image and suck it out like bone marrow. 

The collection's structure is fluid, transitioning seamlessly from traditional verse to prose poems.  The use of white space is its own journey--moving from standard left justification to hanging indents and clusters of words/images/lines that seem to play across the page. 

Drake writes about colliding countries, histories, and lineages.  While it touches on love, this is not a book of "love poems" in the traditional sense; it is political, complex, and grounded in the reality of the diaspora. As Drake notes, 

It's so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in.

These poems, much like the country itself, refuse to be easily labeled.

In the classroom:

• Line Jar: Have students pull specific lines from the book to use as "poetry starters" or concluding images for their own drafts.
• Found Poetry: Use Drake's vivid imagery to create found poems.
• Form Study: Analyze "PANTOUM FOR LOLO AHAS" Discuss how Drake adheres to or breaks the traditional pantoum structure, then have students compose their own. 

From the Publisher:

In her stunning debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, 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.

Publication Information:

• Author: Asa Drake
• Publisher: Tin House
• Publication date: February 24, 2026
• Print length: 96 pages