Box set includes 4 poetry collections: Allegories of the Everyday, by Brian Walter; Otherwise Occupied, by Sally Ann Murray, missing, by Beverly Rycroft; and Metaphysical Balm, by Michèle Betty.

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?

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.