Poor

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One of the most culturally arresting moments of this quite extraordinary year was the arrival on our screens of the BBC/HBO comedy-drama I May Destroy You. I feel like it was important to make this work, but henceforth I’m solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy,” he declaims, rising to his feet with a rhetorical flourish. I literally gasped/caught my breath/cried as I read Femi’s poetry collection, just as I had gasped/caught my breath/cried watching IMDY. The name of the boy that now feels unmentionable, as if harking back to a bad war we are all ashamed of.

His two-year tenure as young people’s laureate coincided with one of London’s most horrifying urban design disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire. IMDY and Poor exist as the means through which their creator tries to make sense of the utterly senseless in their lives. Soft and caressing at parts, angry and demanding at others: there is a perfect balance here of emotion and issue.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There are moments throughout that hit you with full force; the book certainly stays with you after completion.

At the heart of the collection is the poet's deconstruction of language, fusing biblical cadence with a contemporary street vernacular. Not exceptional brilliance, he insists – “there was nothing special about me” – but having teachers who inspired him early on with a love of poetry. Femi is interdisciplinary, rejecting the genre-specific paradigms art is usually shoved into to hit sales targets. Giving a mythic resonance to communal life , the poems in Caleb Femi's Poor are vital, confronting and electric .Poor, published in 2020, is a breath-taking ode to Femi’s black boyhood lived inside the concrete blocks and walkways of the estate. It was an example that Femi would carry with him through an English literature degree and on into a teacher training course at King’s College London, from which he went straight on to teach at a Tottenham comprehensive school.