so, so many gems here. it's not quite no-skips for me but it's close. the photography throughout as well, gorgeous. He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over. Their circumstances were still difficult and he knows all about going to school hungry, he says. “Dinner time was when we ate.”

Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year) Flood, Alison (3 October 2016). "Poet Caleb Femi named first young people's laureate for London". The Guardian . Retrieved 14 December 2020. His two-year tenure as young people’s laureate coincided with one of London’s most horrifying urban design disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he writes, in a diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?” Poor is a debut poetry collection like no other. I not only enjoyed it, but learned a lot in the process. ⁠I've already mentioned one other poet, Anna Akhmatova, but this collection also reminded of something Ilya Kaminsky wrote in Deaf Republic: Caleb Femi (born 1990) is a British-Nigerian author, film-maker, photographer, and former young people's laureate for London. His debut poetry collection, Poor, was awarded a Forward Prize for Poetry.

For someone who loved Yeats and Pope and had discovered a reflection of his own experience in TS Eliot’s descriptions of Margate in The Waste Land, it was a bitter disappointment. “It was such a rigid curriculum. I didn’t have the best experience of school growing up, but there was still space for your imagination and your individualism to at least stretch its legs a little bit.” For now his own space is a flat in Deptford, which he shares with a cat called Dennis Adeyemi. It’s a female cat, he volunteers, because he had originally intended to adopt a male but took pity on the runt of the litter and couldn’t be bothered to think up a new name. He is by nature self-contained and nomadic, in regular touch with, but not close to his family, tramping the city streets with a head full of plans, dreaming of the films he will make and the poems he will write. Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground?

Retailers:

In a way, this book is the poet's coming-of-age, paying tribute to the people from his surroundings that lead difficult lives. ⁠ a b c Peirson-Hagger, Ellen (28 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Poetry is the art of the people' ". New Statesman . Retrieved 14 December 2020. Some of the poems are difficult to penetrate, written in a coded language; others are more accessible, but all of them serve as a testament to a neighbourhood-worth generation of boys in all of its specificity. ⁠ Femi performs at Mulberry’s ‘My Local’ Festive Event, November 2019. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images/Mulberry Armitstead, Claire (30 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Henceforth I'm solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 16 November 2020.