Intimate, wry and a little sour, Asa Drake's Beauty Talk addresses the (im)possibility of talking about beauty in America without addressing whiteness. Here is a personal history of who gets to be beautiful.

While Beauty Talk pulls from the autobiographical: a father as the 1970's Camel cigarette man, correspondences with abandoned siblings, an historic family map; the collection is shaped by the illegibility, omission and ekphrasis of the personal archive. Embracing a fractal telling, these poems explore an inheritance of mixed aesthetics and what it means to partake in a lineage that is both colonial and immigrant. Drake pulls from sources as varied as Chiwan Choi's adaptation of the Bechdel test and Viv Chen's substack The Molehill to index the racial and gendered language of advertisement copy, incident reports, and parental beauty advice. Woven between these coded distinctions of moral and aesthetic utility, Beauty Talk asks if, perhaps, family is the first commodification of the body.

Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.

"With lyrical grace and profound introspection, Beauty Talk asks important questions about multiracial identity, migration, and belonging. From intergenerational stories, in finely wrought verse, Drake excavates deeply personal yet resonant ground in these poems. Beauty Talk is a place where 'the body is a borderland susceptible to other borders' and 'beauty is a labor' that offers readers a nuanced understanding of self and heritage. This is stunning work by a keen poetic voice." — Kiki Petrosino

"In the textured tapestry of Asa Drake's Beauty Talk, lineage, belonging, desire, race, and liminality are dexterously interwoven as the poems meander an archive of photographs, memories, phone calls, and records. Aware of its own tactility, this striking collection allows threads to split, fray, and spill out of brackets into white space, reminding readers that 'hybridity promises a certain difficulty of reproduction' as the speaker makes meaning of what is and what was. Drake's poems 'share the world—not just the image but the feeling of it,' by inviting readers to witness her trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, 'to reject demands for legibility' that would require her speaker 'to make the right sound for sympathy.' Beauty Talk is a book of 'encounters and visitations,' by which I look forward to being continually visited." — Chet’la Sebree

"'I didn't want to co-author a book with my father's image,' Asa Drake divulges in Beauty Talk directly above a photo of her white father, a 1970s Camel cigarette model. 'I feared that like my mother you would be seduced.' Confession, in Drake's latest poetry collection, is a painstaking art, much like the performance of beauty. These mesmerizingly smart, expansive poems, intermixed with intimate, enlivening prose interludes, know when to yank open the drapes to the poet's innermost thoughts and when to trust subtlety will best crank up the tension to rattling heights. Cultural critique meets private group chat, Asa Drake's Beauty Talk is bold, brainy, and—sincerely—beautiful." — Eugenia Leigh