Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize
Take Care – Eunice Andrada
Poetry · Giramondo
About the Book
TAKE CARE explores what it means to survive within systems not designed for tenderness. Bound in personal testimony, the poems situate the act of rape within the machinery of imperialism, where human and non-human bodies, lands, and waters are violated to uphold colonial powers. Andrada explores the magnitude of rape culture in the everyday: from justice systems that dehumanise survivors, to exploitative care industries that deny Filipina workers their agency, to nationalist monuments that erase the sexual violence of war.
Unsparing in their interrogation of the gendered, racialised labour of care, the poems flow to a radical, liberatory syntax. Physical and online terrain meld into a surreal ecosystem of speakers, creatures, and excavated histories. Brimming with incantatory power, Andrada’s verses move between breathless candour and seething restraint as they navigate memory and possibility. Piercing the heart of our cultural crisis, these poems are salves, offerings, and warnings.
“Andrada’s collection adroitly combines the personal, the political, and the geopolitical, narrated by a voice that is at once hip, witty, and deeply serious.”
– 2022 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Eunice Andrada
Eunice Andrada is a poet and educator. Her first poetry collection Flood Damages won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. TAKE CARE is her second poetry collection. Born and raised in the Philippines, she currently lives and writes on unceded Gadigal Land.
Further Reading
Reviews
“This is a tremendous, transformative work of power and incendiary rage, and of resistance and survival against the odds.” – Eileen Chong, The Saturday Paper
“…these poems do not flirt around the intensity of their subject matter—they demand your recognition, as well as your unease.” – Donnalyn Xu, Mascara Literary Review
“TAKE CARE is a feminist reckoning.” – Thuy On, ArtsHub
Links
Read an interview with Eunice Andrada by Cher Tan via Liminal Mag
Watch Eunice Andrada read from TAKE CARE, via Giramondo Publishing
Listen to Ellen van Neerven and Eunice Andrada in conversation on Extraordinary Voices for Extraordinary Times via the University of Queensland Press
Judges’ Report
Eunice Andrada’s second poetry collection meditates on the ethics of care and the need to dismantle in order to recollect, to recover, and to create. Andrada is a master of final lines, and many of these poems – ‘Subtle Asian Traits’, ‘Duolingo’, ‘Pipeline Polyptych’ – conclude with memorably succinct and inspired turns, as in the sardonic humour of ‘Don’t you hate it when women’, which goes from “kill the herbs on the windowsill /devote their year’s salary to take-out” to “kill the cop / the colonizer / the capitalist / living rent-free in their heads / demolish the altar built on their backs / without blame /walk away”. Andrada’s collection adroitly combines the personal, the political, and the geopolitical, narrated by a voice that is at once hip, witty, and deeply serious. Andrada has the imaginative ability to move between the memories of poet-narrators, historical asides, reflections on the nature of race and feminism in Australia, and questions of colonisation both locally and in the Philippines. Formally remarkable, stylistically impressive, and often surprising, TAKE CARE is a collection that understands the ways in which “There are things we must kill / so we can live to celebrate.”
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ARBN: 657 317 283