Powerful
first collection by acclaimed Filipina Australian performance poet
In Flood Damages Andrada explores themes
associated with immigration and inheritance, through the figure of a young Australian
Filipina woman, whose family has been irreparably damaged by deportation,
violence and illness. The wounds inflicted by these events, political and
personal, are felt most keenly in and through her body – ‘your blood sings of
the scattered histories/ that left you here’ – and in a dramatic use of language,
influenced by the rhythms of prayer, which expresses pain and anger with
passionate intensity. A performance poet, Andrada combines the theatrical
qualities of voice and image in this, her first published collection, affirming
the female body as a site of vulnerability and power.
