Grimoire is Cherene Sherrard’s second full-length collection of poetry, due to be released in September to what I expect will be general—and well-deserved—acclaim. Sherrard’s poems cover everything from Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work to racial disparities in maternal mortality rates to the experience of Black motherhood in the United States. She incorporates recipes and anecdotes from A Domestic Cookbook by Malinda Russell as well, the first known cookbook to have been written by a Black woman in the United States. Sherrard’s poetry shifts effortlessly in form from sonnet to blackout and back again, weaving the modern with the traditional and history with the present.
There is a sense of movement present not just throughout the collection as a whole, but in the individual poems. The fluidity of Sherrard’s writing is what sets Grimoire apart. In “What Makes the Dutch Antilles,” my favorite poem in the collection, Sherrard writes “the flesh, however, is more resilient, it gives / only when doused with pepper and lime. Lyme, / a mercurial substance, can be drizzled over a mass / grave and still a grove of almond trees will rise,” four elegant, well-balanced lines that encompass life, death, and survival.
Violence and resilience are intertwined in Grimoire. “You don’t want to clean up that much blood,” Sherrard writes in “Home Birth Suite,” but that’s exactly what her poetry does. From domestic violence to hate crimes, racism, misogyny, and violence inflicted by the state—the police officers sent to the speaker’s home to discuss her homeschooled son’s perceived truancy in “A Tempest in a Teapot”—first there’s blood, then “[the officers] leave hurriedly, their lips stained berry-red.”
Timely and timeless, Sherrard’s Grimoire is one of 2020’s must-read poetry collections.
