TAKE CARE

Judges' Comments 

In her second full-length collection, Eunice Andrada uses her elegant lyric voice to peel back the surface of a common phrase and reveal what it elides: the way that care is commodified under capitalism and extorted from migrant and refugee women, particularly Filipinos, to be given to others who can afford it. From Australia to the US, the Philippines to Israel, from underpaid healthcare work to the daily indignities of patriarchal violence, these poems shine a light on a global network built on cruelty. 

Andrada takes aim not only at history and the perils of the present, but also dares to imagine a subversive and hopeful future. ‘Filipino women stop working. / Empires shut down in a tantrum // refusing to care for themselves.’ This is a deeply personal and intelligent critique of capitalist patriarchy’s cruelties that manages, still, to be inventive in its poetics and tender at its core.