Beauty Talk - An Evening with Asa Drake

Tombolo Books welcomes award-winning poet Asa Drake to the bookstore for a celebration of her latest poetry collection, Beauty Talk. Drake will be accompanied by local poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico for a reading and conversation!

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.

More about Beauty Talk

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 Georgia Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. She is the author of three collections of poetry, My Perfect Cognate (Copper Canyon Press September 2025), Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015). She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida where she is Director of the Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library.