Beauty Talk

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.