KONTRA

Winner of the 2026 VPLA Prize for Poetry

New collection by multiple award-winning Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada.

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.