The Grimoire of Grimalkin

Declared a ‘contemporary masterpiece’ on its original publication in 2007, Sascha Aurora Akhtar's debut collection is a work of post-modern Gothic. Its poems are concerned with mythology, meaning-making, the magical and mystical; a grimoire is a magic textbook or spellbook. Akhtar’s writing skilfully blends archaic languages with contemporary slang, wordplay, and esoteric vocabularies to create a language of its own. ‘On reading The Grimoire of Grimalkin, it’s clear that Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a language-diviner, her poems conjured from “the galaxy of lingual acrobatics.” Akhtar’s poems, which are like nobody else’s, are gobsmacking, magical. This work casts a wild, incantatory music that beguiles both ear and tongue.’ – Sylvia Legris