“Shazea Quraishi disguises her poetic of taking apart and reanimating as the work of a taxidermist-in-residence in Mexico. Under poetic constraints, poems are imaginative and precise, but also lean diminutive... Her vessels are suggestive: “Sometimes live birds / were enclosed in the hollow bodies of dolls.” Like a breath in a kiln, she catches life, cools it. A clay pot, now 1000 funerary folded cranes, now a film, a poem.”
Leah Jun Oh in Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Autumn 2022
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Long Poem Magazine
PBS Autumn Bulletin
“Brand new and long awaited poetry from this elegant and meticulous poet.
What has the body of a white mouse to show us? What is art? And how can we live with death?
The contemplative and poised poems in this collection tackle the vast questions of life and art. Their simplicity is beguiling, their vocabulary – hypnotic, as tiny details build slowly, calmly to create a vision as broad as existence itself.”
Leah Jun Oh in Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Autumn 2022
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Litter Magazine
“Shazea Quraishi’s first collection, The Art of Scratching, reveals the poet’s flair for re-imagining and feminising historical texts, and for inventing her own edgy fables of family life and childhood.”
Carol Rumens in Poem of the Week, the Guardian
REVIEWS Poem of the week, the Guardian
“Shazea Quraishi, in The Courtesans Reply, sensitively reconstructs an unfamiliar and vanished culture. Working from historical and literary sources, Quraishi never allows her research to speak louder than the human voices of her characters, a community of courtesans in Ancient India. Their individual feelings and desires emerge through lines which are simultaneously spare and sensuous.”
Richard O’Brien, Poetry London
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