KONTRA
Title: KONTRA
Author: Eunice Andrada
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Shortlist: Poetry
In KONTRA, a collection by the multi-award-winning Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada, characters reckon with the constraints of the past in order to claim a future of their own making.
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 ‘OPERÁ’, 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 voice that is free from domination.
Judges’ Report
KONTRA is an exquisite work of precision. Here awakens an astonishing poetics of dissidence, decadence and eroticism. The kontrabida, a Filipino soap opera villain, is invoked in the many afterlives of violence. By inhabiting the persona of opposition, the poet exhumes another self from the ruins of rape and empire in shifting temporalities. From Renaissance paintings to polyphonic choral voices, Andrada binds lucid and ethereal images together in vivid scenes, imaginatively pulling infinite futures from fracture. Each line is visually palpable and thematically resonant, cutting fertile ground for mutual possibilities of desire and resistance. At once tender and defiant, KONTRA is a testament to lyrical mastery.
Extract
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About the Author
Photo by Hebah Ali
Eunice Andrada
VPLA book photography by Shannyn Higgins
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are proudly supported by the Victorian Government.
