Bøker av Sandra Renew

being one too law-abiding to smash windowsbeing free with spray can and ready-made slogan politicsthere is a line-my body is on the lineat risk and on fileIt's the 1970s and 1980s, and Sandra Renew, a young lesbian activist in Far North Queensland, is involved in some of the most politically charged moments in Australian history. From Pine Gap to civil rights marches in Queensland to the first Gay and Lesiban Mardi Gras and beyond, Apostles of Anarchy juxtaposes newspaper headlines and archival material with the personal experience of these struggles. It asks what it is to fight for the acceptance of difference in a discourse of prejudice and hostility.

In The Ruby Red's Affair, Scoot Valuti undertakes a visit to a local lesbian bar/night club, meets up with her friends, and, in search of a lifelong loving relationship based on mutual respect and appreciation, has a brief flirtation which results, sadly, in a serious affair which lasts a nanosecond and ends badly. Just as the characters are ambiguous and androgynous, so is the book difficult to define: a short novel or a verse narrative, or a poetry novella, or... It chronicles both a moment and a lifetime, a transformative mind-blowing encounter and another despondent disappointment.

Sandra Renew's new poems interrogate the choices made in living and performing gender, sexuality and desire—of struggling to be queer in an Australia of Holden utes and rotting mangoes, XXXX stubbies and Bundy rum, boudoir drawers and country roads, toad princes and wanting to be Wesley Hall. It is a book of not wanting to conform,  charting the myriad pressures society places on conformity as a mode of survival. It is a brave, and sometimes funny book, filled with wry and deeply felt images and observations.

I want my poetry to say something about the state of our world, this catastrophic social and environmental situation we are bringing on ourselves. So my work is social critique and revolves around dissent, contradiction, dissonance; and I write about gender, violence, war, refugees and asylum, environment and climate change. I am fascinated by the fluidity of gender, of femininities and masculinities. One of my favourite texts is Orlando by Virginia Woolf and it is full of the poetry of gender.

Dissent can be a good thing, unless you are killed for it. We live in a world of social fissuring and disruption, where families and nations are stressed by the contexts we live in. Globally, we are witnessing the biggest population movement ever known. This is interlinked with the causes and effects of massive changes in climate which is causing unresolvable tensions around water and land access, citizenship and poverty. Armed conflict, fear, persecution and exclusion allow the fermenting of corruption and war. I write poetry to express contemporary issues and questions of our times about war, language, environment, climate and the planet's health, translation, dislocation, migration, terrorism, border crossings, dissent, gender, protest. Poetry is a specific way of knowing, of crystallising the dissonance in the dominant discourses in a way which is accessible to anyone who is driven by revolution, and which gives expression to social conscience.