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.

This new edition includes a preface by Ágnes Lehóczky and an afterword by the author.

‘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

 

‘Sascha Akhtar repels ghosts with this text and liberates the word from the burden of meaning. These poems are spells and sonorous soundings that have the power to frighten, seduce or enchant. Akhtar aspires to magic. This is a timeless and vital collection from a poet willing to transcend the liminal.’ — Anthony Joseph

Sascha Aurora Akhtar has published seven collections of poetry. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, was shortlisted for the UBL Prize for Literary Excellence in 2023. Akhtar translated Belles-Lettres: Writings of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, the first translation of Ali’s ‘Adab-e-Zareen’, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Belles-Lettres received an Honourable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. A third- generation psychic in the Lancashire lineage, Akhtar studied in Pakistan and at Bennington College, Vermont, and University of Amherst, Massachusetts. Akhtar performs internationally, with recent highlights including the Emirates Festival of Literature, Poetry Wales and Rotterdam Poetry Festival.

Prototype, 2024, 112pages.