Books by Sandra Renew

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.