"Sherrad’s lyricism alone makes the poems worth reading, but uncovering the layers of allusions is a large part of the joy of the poems. Referencing everyone from Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Nina Simone to Beyonce, the book is woven with bright threads that create a rich tapestry of culture—offering the audience much to ponder long after the poems end." —Terrain.org

"Cherene Sherrard reminds us that poetry, like cooking, is as much about ingredients as ingenuity. Her ingredients are positively cornucopian, but it’s Sherrard’s keen, enlivening spirit that gives this remarkable book its flavor.  She makes poems out of fiddle duos, Funkadelic dance-offs, 'sequins of spun sugar,' and especially the first cookbook published by an African American woman. She finds poetry in restoring hair color; she transforms food and people with ginger. Sherrard shows us how to make language, wherever we find it, both tool and weapon. The fabulous Grimoire offers recipes, spells, and instructions for survival." —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin 

"Sherrard’s Grimoire vivifies Black womanhood and motherhood. Seeking an ancestral cipher against the 'grim statistics / of racial math' sends Sherrard to the palm reader, the poets, the musician, the maternity ward, and the first cookbook published by an African-American woman for possibilities. Circumstances of birth and biology, systemic prejudices, and outmoded societal norms are confronted in language of formal elegance and precision that can also cut to the quick; 'Call it survivor’s sparkle. …' the speaker stingingly quips about an enslaved woman arriving on American shores. Ultimately, the poems themselves are the spell and salve that dazzle, writing that conjures the sober magic of endurance." —Chanda Feldman, author of Approaching the Fields

Originally from Los Angeles, Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her creative writing and research explore the nuanced and multifaceted aspects of black life in the diaspora. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (2007), Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (2011) and the editor of a Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Her debut poetry collection, Vixen, was published in 2017 and her chapbook, Mistress, Reclining was the winner of the New Women’s Voice Award from Finishing Line Press. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant and poetry fellowships to Ragdale and Sewanee Writer’s Conference.