In this serious, often playful, sometimes outrageous volume, Murray draws inspiration from contemporary women’s experimental poetics. The collection recognises female writers’ equivocal relation to forms of the linguistic avant-garde such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and brings embodiment and affective voicing back into the provocative equation. Yet, this is not a simple return to lyric intimacy. Murray inflects poetry’s familiar inner speech with the sounds and shapes of found materials and engaging cultural noise.
In Otherwise Occupied, the seamlessness of the beautiful, expressive poem becomes otherwise under the innovative necessity of the page as an open field of multiple (mis)takes and (mis)givings. Here, a poem is a space of enactment, a process of thinking-writing and performative exploration: idea ↔ body, lyric ↔ language, innovative necessity ↔ enduring convention. And in the end: there is no subject outside language.

Otherwise Occupied

Literature & Fiction

Murray, Sally-Ann

Poetry

Dryad Press

Halley is a smart girl growing up poor in Durban, close to the bustling docks. Trying to make ends meet is her mother, Nora, who pares herself to the bone to provide. Halley’s sister is bored of everything, but she’s not a regular girl anyway, she’s a princess. Halley finds a way to live that’s more than making do. She finds that a little love and imagination can take you pretty far, and that they certainly help to hold the curious bits and pieces together. It’s an unusual package, but what more, she wonders, could anyone want from life, or from a long, lovely story?

Small Moving Parts

Nb Pub Ltd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Murray, Sally-Ann. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Murray, Sally-Ann

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Murray, Sally-Ann. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Otherwise Occupied

Small Moving Parts