She Goes to Town

'She separates herself. There are different voices here, and

separations. Cutting away

from her past, from varied, acceptable and permissible futures

dreamed into expectations by others on her behalf. From

always being a dangerous difference in a country town, and

rural school. Segue to wide-eyed in the city, to wild eyed, in a

city never imagined.'

In She Goes to Town Sandra Renew writes as a lesbian poet. She shows a gendered world from the point of view of outsider and one who lives on the fringes of heterosexuality, and who fully inhabits a voice of dissent and protest. She deep-dives into gender and comments on living in both urban and rural communities.

She Goes to Town explores the tensions between leaving and staying, crossing lines, endings and beginnings. In poetry, micro-lit, short prose there is a mapping of the path to destruction and the saving graces of hope and trying again.

Sandra Renew's poetry has been awarded two Canberra Critics Circle Awards, in 2023 for Apostles of Anarchy (Recent Work Press) and in 2019, with Moya Pacey, 'for their influential work in exposing Canberra women's poetry to view through their biannual online journal for women's poetry, Not Very Quiet 2017-2022'.

Sandra's collection, It's the sugar, Sugar (Recent Work Press, 2021) won the ACT Writers Notable Awards for Poetry 2021.

Acting Like a Girl (Recent Work Press, 2019) was the winner of the 2020 ACT Writing and Publishing Award for Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year.

She writes on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land (Canberra) and Yuin land (Cobargo).

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