TAKE CARE

Shortlisted for The Stella Prize

SHORTLISTED: The Stella Prize 2022
SHORTLISTED: NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2022
SHORTLISTED: QLD Literary Awards – Judith Wright Calanthe Award 2022
LONGLISTED: ALS Gold Medal 2022

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.

Brilliant and devastating, TAKE CARE is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, weaving complex themes with intelligence and innovation of form. Eunice Andrada honours women who care but are uncared for, exemplifying the role of rage to echo ancestral stories and to speak against empire. A poet whose courage is necessary and whose words we all need. I can’t stop thinking about this book.
Ellen van Neerven

TAKE CARE is the live wire of poetry that does not spare us…each poem both a surrender and a severing, each page an urgent demand we do not look away from violence, from its banal to its most grotesque, and each word filled with as much purpose and energy as it is with tenderness and care. Andrada’s writing is a reckoning – it takes us as a society where we need to go, whether we come willingly or not.
Sara Saleh

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.’
The Stella Prize, judges’ comments

A book by an Ilongga poet living in so-called ‘Australia’ about the machinery of rape as imperialist technology, anathema to life-saving care, opens the aperture to both ecstatic reading and resounding grief.
Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Meanjin