**Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2026, Poetry** KONTRA enacts a poetics of clashing decadences, testing the tightrope between ‘feminine’ goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion. It casts a female gaze on the kontrabida a Filipina soap opera villain stuck in a rise-and-fall cycle. The poet reimagines the kontrabida as a figure driven not by revenge, but by wild desire. Oscillating in and out of character, Andrada navigates the tension between poet and persona. Alongside the shapeshifting, spectral force of the kontrabida, the poet invokes a chorus of voices to trace a lineage of opposition and the alternate futures it holds. The collection is in the form of a narrative triptych. The opening section ‘KONTRA’ explores the power and fate of the oppositional figure. In ‘OPER’, two characters speak alongside each other to excise painful histories of domination and sexual assault; which moves us forward to the final section ‘BIDA’, to a more genuine, queer persona that is free from domination. Praise for Eunice Andrada: ‘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…A poet whose courage is necessary and whose words we all need.’ 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.’ Sara Saleh
