Brilliant Corners

Nuzhat Bukhari was born in South Asia and moved to England in childhood. She has also spent a year living in Ireland and in America. She taught literature at Oxford and Cambridge for several years. Brilliant Corners is her first book.

‘A richly cosmopolitan set of poems, unflinching and restrained in equal measure.’ – Priyamvada Gopal ‘Completely original and utterly inspiring.’ – Jon Snow ‘Like a diamond, these poems combine hard clarity with fascination. They are prismatic, with a tendency to make light behave treacherously. As they tilt and inflect, they reveal their corners: grim ironies and dazzling contradictions; points of unexpected contiguity; the cutlines between words and ideas, histories and narratives. They know, too, that a stone is a nucleus of guilty safety. The result is a collection that is abstract and adamant, sparkling, ruthlessly sharp.’ – Abigail Parry‘Real-world violence juxtaposed against the page, the proximity of the singular self to the wider brutality of history, and how those things interact, how the white page often sanitises what it writes about … These are poems which refuse to look away from the realities of empire and the canon – see a poem like “Adlestrop” which deconstructs and refigures the etymology of the words hiding just behind the place name, or the poem “Haiti” where Bukhari writes: “The underbrush of the English lyric catches my feet.”’ – Andrew McMillan, PBS Bulletin‘There’s a sharpness – in both senses – to much of Bukhari’s writing, unafraid and high-stakes, not least in “Pathology”, an elegy with ice, or perhaps a splash of acid, in its veins … As with the body on the slab, Bukhari presents a similarly unimpressed, scrutinising front to the other patriarchal and imperial cadavers she confronts.’ – Declan Ryan, Poetry Review ‘The strongest poems are written with almost clinical exactitude … [Bukhari] wants to face horror and give it a voice. Her impacted language is part of that project: she is trying to find a way out of poetry’s lyrical daydream.’ – Maitreyabandhu, Brixton Review of Books‘Brilliant Corners is full of inglorious comedowns for imperial legacies and tormented meditations on art’s relationship with a fallen world ... The lesson we learn is the grim absurdity of looking for lessons in atrocities: “sometimes I think wisdom from history is like that odd shoe / you find in the street & wonder how the person got home”.’ – David Wheatley, Guardian