Kirjahaku

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.

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.