Otherwise Occupied

by Sally Ann Murray

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.

£18.00

About the author

Sally Ann Murray

Sally Ann Murray is Chair of the English Department at Stellenbosch
University. She has an MA (cum laude) and a PhD from the University of
Natal, Durban. Her novel, Small Moving Parts (Kwela, 2009), won the 2013
UKZN Book Prize, the 2010 M-Net Literary Award for Best Novel in
English, and the 2010 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for Best Publication
Media 24. It was also shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg
Prize (2010), and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize (2010). She was the
recipient of the 1991 Sanlam Award for Literature (Poetry) and the 1989
Arthur Nortje/Vita Award for poetry. Her poems have recently been
published in poetry journals Aerodrome and Five Points, and in The New
Century of South African Poetry (Jonathan Ball, 2018). Otherwise
Occupied is her third poetry volume, her previous collections being open
season (HardPressd, 2006) and Shifting (Carrefour Press, 1992). She has
also published short fiction, most recently in the Short.Sharp.Stories
competition anthologies Incredible Journey (Mercury Books, 2015), Trade
Secrets (Tattoo Press, 2017), and Instant Exposure (National Arts
Festival, 2018).