‘Take care,’ the book’s title and a poem by the same name, asks its intended audience, the poet’s kapwa, to look after herself. ‘Take care’ (Ingat) is a phrase Filipinos often say to each other. In this context, the poet’s kapwa need to be reminded to take care because caretaking takes up so much of a life. Andrada’s poems remind us to revisit the worth we attach to labour. Without care work and a global army of Filipino caregivers, capitalism would collapse. Maybe one reason capitalism persists is we’re mobilising the wrong people to take a break.

A theatre of cruelty – in this case, a poetics of cruelty – reduces the distance between the reader and the work’s tortuous beating heart. After page after page of eloquent verse seething about the personal impact of enduring economic and sexual exploitation, the reasons for the rage are evident.

From ‘Pipeline Polyptych’:

in war, I am
mistaken for a nurse or 
someone’s property: a
degree separated from 
death. When he discovers 
where I’m from, he asks
about the brothels in 
Angeles. Insists I must 
visit. o world, how you
shine with our spit.

to ‘Subtle Asian Traits’:

Come autumn, it’s a woman’s face that flutters
Down a decaying timeline, instead of the blue
-eyed rapist they insisted on calling a swimmer. 

to ‘On Invasion Day’:

No matter out of place
Where invasion is so everyday 
It is unremarkable. 

Nothing remains private in the eye 
Of the colonizer : the rapist : the man
Behind the rifle on the overpass. 

I resist desirability.
My sight dismantles 
What sees me. 

These brief phrases are cutting. An atonal melodic line contradicts the karaoke cover-band musicality often associated with Filipino migrants. A blunt edge that punctures the model minority myth, the way much excellent Asian-Australian writing does. No grateful flag-waving brown faces here. I imagine these poems would be read aloud with the same self-contained flatness with which one would read an obituary or judicial ruling. If today’s dailies come across as histrionic, these poems appear devoid of affect, as if to say, ‘In an Internet full of fake news, these are the facts. Just the facts.’ If the facts arouse rage and despair, it is because of the seeming unchangeability of the circumstances they describe.

Sarah Ruhl writes about the over-use of the ‘arc’ in playwriting: ‘Aristotle thought form was natural, but he thought the natural form was always an arc. Do we think the arc is a natural structure because of the structure of the male orgasm?’¹ What if catharsis is just a lovely world for men releasing themselves from complexity through cumming? Do women and all varieties of not-men even get to cum? What would sex – and art – be like, if it weren’t built around the assumption of a so-called natural, inevitable conclusion, such as the expectation of release? Should we pressure art to release us from what has not yet been released in history? Is art a bad bottom when it does not yield this release – or gives the appearance of yielding but with grimacing and much complaint, the ultimate resistance residing in the dull stare of the obstinate, the unpleasured, the unpossessable?