The Grimoire of Grimalkin by Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a poetry collection concerned with language as an energetic force. Akhtar invokes the form of the grimoire, spellbooks written by occultists in the 16th century, to explore the relationship of personal myth-making to the wider macrocosm in which we exist, through colonial and gendered trauma; a grimalkin was a derogatory term used for the elder women seen as a ‘witch’: spiteful and mean, but also a shape-shifter, a cat.
Akhtar’s writing deftly weaves obsolete or ‘dead’ words with dialect, slang – a lashing of esoteric vocabularies to create a language that too shifts shapes, and through its rage wields the power to leave the patriarchy for dead. The poet holds no prisoners.
Akhtar’s debut when it was originally published in 2007, The Grimoire of Grimalkin is a primordial work of contemporary Gothic from one of the most exciting and daring poets working in the UK today.
