Exclusive Cover Reveal of BEAUTY TALK by Asa Drake

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Beauty Talk by Asa Drake, which will be published on October 13th, 2026 by Noemi Press. You can pre-order your copy here.

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, a 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 te...