Poor

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Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. I May Destroy You and Poor foreground those stories criminally overlooked, neglected or silenced in media and literature (arguably also in society more widely). You don't even need to be a poetry fan to enjoy this, it's just exceptional stories told with heart and soul.

When I read Femi’s great first collection of poetry, I tremble at the genius, and tear up at the sight of his testimonial. The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the structural disadvantages of being poor and urban, he points out. Giving a mythic resonance to communal life , the poems in Caleb Femi's Poor are vital, confronting and electric . Even by using the word ‘poor,’ by emblazing it as the title of his book, Femi announces without apology the lived reality of poverty in the present, not in a Dickensian past. Immersed in my nineteenth-century critical-creative doctoral thesis, being a bookish white girl who is upwardly socially mobile, when I read Femi’s prize-winning collection of poetry Poor, I couldn’t articulate the impact the book had on me.A few decades ago, this would have seemed unimaginable; and Femi unreservedly reminds the reader of the brutality of poverty that has shaped the endz. 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.

As part of the unit, use extracts from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2019) as the basis of a RUAE paper. The problem was not that the kids were unreachable, he stresses, but that he had blundered into the straitjacket of the “Gove curriculum”, in which the then education minister Michael Gove had imposed strict limits on what could be taught.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. J. Harling’s fiction and non-fiction has been published in numerous online journals including Square Wheel Press, Olit, Queen Mob's Tea House and XRAY. In 2020, Caleb Femi released his award-winning debut poetry collection, Poor, reflecting on his experiences growing up on the North Peckham estate.

Caleb Femi: ‘In lockdown, when we all had an hour allocated to us to go out into the fresh air, how many had access to greenery and nature? Femi Caleb shines light on the darkness that speaks not only of Peckham, London, but internationally POOR lifestyle can be found in Brooklyn. While Femi doesn’t need my identification with his works, you, reader, should bear in mind that even if you didn’t grow up in the endz, that Femi’s work both centres and transcends southeast London, that the heartbreak and social housing and poetics in this volume are truly great and should be canon, even if canon is an antiquated way to express it. In a poem entitled “Survivor’s Guilt, or Anikulapo” he spells out the emotional toll taken by the deaths that were part of ordinary life for anyone who grew up on the estate: “My presence at funerals felt like bragging … I am a museum of all / The ghosts I could have been. He showed me that there were ways in which you can love yourself and have a good time, and test yourself as well.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. IMDY and Poor exist as the means through which their creator tries to make sense of the utterly senseless in their lives. Caleb has documented the journey and experiences of not just many black youths of this generation but he captures the experience of all disadvantaged youths who are full of promise, hope and talents. In Poor , Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham.

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. I was always masking my abstinence from drug consumption with booze, jokes about getting high from the fumes around me and generally creating a bit of a scene.In lockdown, when we all had an hour allocated to us to go out into the fresh air, how many had access to greenery and nature? A few months later the mural was demolished, along with the tower block where the Femi family lived, and they were moved to a four-bedroom terrace house down the road. Caleb Femi's riveting photographs and compassionate yet hard-hitting lines map North Peckham's black boys and blocks .