This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.
Krista's next choice for the best of 2023 is One Way to Listen by Asa Drake, released by Gold Line Press in 2022, selected by guest editor Sarah Clark.
Disagreeable Aspects of Hyphenation
Driving through the South wearing my mother’s clothes vs. someone who visits like they don’t know how to approach a wasp nest.
A co-worker explains there’s nothing special about the food I grew up with. I had invited her into my home. I had picked fruit from my own yard, food I’d grown because it was impossible to buy. She had packed a to-go plate for her husband. That’s when she told me, leaving, There’s nothing special about the food you grew up with.
I forget to protect my teeth, and now I find craze lines in the enamel.
The webinar trainer asks that I practice. What are you going to say? It is so easy to know how another will root out my provenance. Less to understand what I want from this conversation I don’t want.
I don’t know.
To protect my teeth, I put my tongue between the bite. I don’t think the dead are waiting for us to do anything in particular. It’s been 24 years and I still carry a nest of small animals. This year’s is the first that survives. Something I’ve touched that lives, so this is the least of my sins.
Remember, America is only one possibility.
Online, the silk advertises I can sleep anywhere and shows me bodies asleep in the desert. Here the snakes don’t bite. They wrap around me under a silk gown and keep their mouths closed. Keeping our mouths closed keeps us warm. We’re in this together. Dreaming a man—not the lover— gets too close, so close we all open our mouths.
Who’s happier than Medusa? I think I hear my lover, but I’ve misheard him. He was cutting her up. Who’s halved more than Medusa?
I can’t say. There are a million things you can halve in the world. A million you can’t.
Asa Drake is a Filipina American poet and writer in Central Florida. She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (2023), was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her most recent poems can be found in The American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape and Waxwing.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Apostasies by Holli Carrell - May 8, 2026
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Apostasies by Holli Carrell - May 7, 2026
- Sundress Reads: Review of Under The Rain - May 6, 2026