One Way to Listen by Asa Drake
Alumni 2022 - Creative Writing at The New School
SPD Books, 2023
Asa Drake’s incisive debut chapbook, One Way to Listen, carves through simplistic narratives, filling in the new space with “nests of small animals,” surreal details that promote curiosity, and “room for uncertainty.” Operating with furious imagination, these poems return to interlocking loves: of family, place, and self—love especially in resistance to rising violence that this speaker, a Filipina American woman, is positioned to live in acute awareness of. Through such tenderness, Drake opens vital questions about relation and grief. In response to the 2021 Atlanta spa shooting, Drake’s speaker asks what outfit is appropriate to wear after a loss “no one will recognize.” These poems demand recognition. They process aggressions through layered metaphor. As she lays clothed in snakes who shut their mouths to keep warm, the speaker identifies the risks, always, of being a speaker. Of letting in the cold. A brilliant emerging writer, Asa Drake’s debut collection is urgent and unforgettable. –Taneum Bambrick, author of Vantage and Intimacies, Received
Examining consumption culture, workplace microaggressions, and intergenerational experiences, One Way to Listen explores a fragmented experience in a setting defined by capitalism and diaspora. These poems study the border and how it is defined through the body, ornament, and nationhood. They seek a better understanding of what we risk by speaking in a geography that is both familiar and divisive. Navigating the difficulties of a marginalized body in a public space, these poems ask, what do we choose for ourselves and with what success?