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.