'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
'‘The actor is a heart athlete,’ Antonin Artaud wrote in 1958. He was writing about theatre, but I wonder if the same could be said of the poet. ‘To arrive at the emotions through their powers instead of regarding them as pure extraction, confers a mastery on an actor equal to a true healer’s. A crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct. To use emotions the same way a boxer uses muscles. To know there is a physical outlet for the soul. (93 – 95).' (Introduction)
'For her 1993 work Lick and Lather, the artist Janine Antoni created fourteen busts in her own likeness. From a mould of her head and shoulders she cast seven life-sized replicas of herself out of chocolate, then seven more out of ivory-coloured soap. The resultant sets of almost-identical busts depicted Antoni in sharp, fine detail: eyes closed, hair slicked away from a low, heart-shaped hairline, lips with a barely perceptible downward turn. Once they were complete Antoni lovingly, languidly erased her features from each of the busts by gently licking and nibbling those made from chocolate and bathing with those made from soap. Afterward only the suggestion of herself remained, each statue masked with a smooth, newly-indistinct face that could belong to anyone.' (Introduction)
'In TAKE CARE, Eunice Andrada has further developed her poetics as a multilingual woman of Ilonggo ancestry from the Philippines. This new collection, her second after Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018), interrogates the ethics of possession and custodianship – what determines who takes and who receives? The concept of “care” is examined through the lens of American imperialism and global capitalism, exploring how power and violence are intimately tied to varying forms of nurturing, reproduction and the maintenance of existing structures of dominance and control.' (Introduction)
'How do we give shape to what resists language? How do words move against the body, in dialogue with its silence, its noise? These tangled questions emerge from my reading of Eunice Andrada’s second collection of poems, TAKE CARE, and the writing of this review, which has taken weeks of slow thinking. Like many others, I have found both comfort and discomfort in poetry during a time of immeasurable loss. I leave most things unread, I seek a return to what is comfortable and familiar. In my own work, I attempt poems about windows or flowers; always in the eyeline of where it hurts, but slightly out-of-focus. Yet, TAKE CARE is piercing in a way that cuts through the haze with a deliberate sharpness. Connected through the theme of rape culture as it exists in everyday and institutional scales, these poems do not flirt around the intensity of their subject matter—they demand your recognition, as well as your unease. As Andrada writes in her author’s statement with Giramondo Press, in TAKE CARE she has “attempted to get as close as possible to the hurting bone”. ' (Introduction)
'For her 1993 work Lick and Lather, the artist Janine Antoni created fourteen busts in her own likeness. From a mould of her head and shoulders she cast seven life-sized replicas of herself out of chocolate, then seven more out of ivory-coloured soap. The resultant sets of almost-identical busts depicted Antoni in sharp, fine detail: eyes closed, hair slicked away from a low, heart-shaped hairline, lips with a barely perceptible downward turn. Once they were complete Antoni lovingly, languidly erased her features from each of the busts by gently licking and nibbling those made from chocolate and bathing with those made from soap. Afterward only the suggestion of herself remained, each statue masked with a smooth, newly-indistinct face that could belong to anyone.' (Introduction)
