In Poor, his first poetry collection, Caleb Femi gives the reader a snapshot of growing up Black, male and poor on a North Peckham housing estate.
Part speaking truth to power, part love letter to his home Femi described the collection as ‘an ode to a troubled yet enchanted world, and the Black boys raised in it’.
While the poems are often dark, bleak and hard-edged, the humour and ingenuity of the young people Femi writes about shout loudly to the reader.
Femi’s words are powerful and beautiful, and interwoven with images of the estate’s brutalist architecture (taken by Femi), this collection is a lyrical meditation on boyhood.