The Art of Scratching

Taking inspiration from sources including historical and medical texts, curator’s notes and the Complete Kama Sutra, Shazea Quraishi’s poems explore love and loss through a range of voices: an Iraqi mother holds her fragile son; under the guise of ardour, a courtesan searches a client for signs of the woman she loves; a wife is unsettled by her husband’s new family... The Art of Scratching is her first book-length collection, and includes The Courtesans Reply, a sequence written in response to the Caturbhani, four plays written around 300 BC on the life of courtesans in India.

Shazea Quraishi was born in Pakistan, emigrated to Canada aged ten, and lived in Madrid before moving to London where she works as a writer, teacher and translator. A selection of her work was included in Bernardine Evaristo’s Bloodaxe anthology Ten: new poets from Spread the Word in 2010. Her first pamphlet, The Courtesans Reply, was published by flipped eye in 2012. The Art of Scratching (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) is her first book-length collection.