AustLit

'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.'

Source : publication summary

'In Flood Damages Andrada explores themes associated with immigration and inheritance, through the figure of a young Australian Filipina woman, whose family has been irreparably damaged by deportation, violence and illness. The wounds inflicted by these events, political and personal, are felt most keenly in and through her body – ‘your blood sings of the scattered histories/ that left you here’ – and in a dramatic use of language, influenced by the rhythms of prayer, which expresses pain and anger with passionate intensity. A poet and performing artist, Andrada combines the theatrical qualities of voice and image in this, her first published collection, affirming the female body as a site of vulnerability and power.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.