Lyrical, heartbreaking and hopeful, the Peckham poet's debut collection exploring the lives of young Black boys, and the architecture that shapes them.
Raised on the North Peckham estate in South London, Caleb Femi is a poet and director. He has written and directed short films for the BBC and Channel 4, and poems for Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and more. He has been featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. From 2016 to 2018, he served as the Young People's Laureate for London. He recently wrote the liner material for Kano's 2019 album Hoodies All Summer. This is his first book.
Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive
*New Statesman (Books of the Year)*
It's rare for a book of poems to repeatedly leave you breathless
when reading it. Such is the urgent brilliance of Caleb Femi's Poor
. . . Femi's language is restlessly inventive, unerring in
uncovering images that lodge in your memory. His use of concrete as
a recurring motif is brutally graceful, encapsulating this
startlingly beautiful book, a landmark debut for British poetry
*Guardian*
I am reading a powerful book of poetry by a young man, Caleb Femi.
Oh my God, he has a book called Poor and he's just stirring me.
Destroying me. I look up to him as a poet
*Michaela Coel*
Caleb Femi is a gift to us all from the storytelling gods. He is a
poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy. But above all, this is
love poetry. Love of community, language, music and form. This book
flows from the fabric of boyhood to the politics and architecture
of agony, from the material to the spiritual, always moving, always
real. Poor is the heartbeat of a living city which truly knows
itself. Caleb is a mighty and positive force in UK culture and this
is a vital book
*Max Porter, author of Lanny*
In this fabulous debut, concrete becomes a paradox of toughness and
vulnerability, confinement and shelter . . . Caleb Femi's riveting
photographs and compassionate yet hard-hitting lines map North
Peckham's black boys and blocks . . . His depictions of young black
men possess a brother's empathy . . . It's simply stunning. Every
image is a revelation
*Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future
Assassin*
Mesmerizing and transporting. I've never read a collection like
this . . . I literally had to shake off the experience once I was
finished. [This] incredible collection . . . gives voice to a
London many would prefer to ignore . . . I don't think it possible
for anyone to come away from this book without having developed new
levels of empathy and compassion
*Derek Owusu, author of That Reminds Me*
Impressive . . . At the heart of the collection is the poet's
deconstruction of language, fusing biblical cadence with a
contemporary street vernacular. There is something reminiscent of
William Blake's visionary poetic in Femi's commitment to a
realistic worship for places like Aylesbury Estate and North
Peckham, as well as their communities . . . [recalls] Gwendolyn
Brooks's and Nate Marshall's odes to Chicago . . . [Poor is] in
conversation with Roger Robinson's and Jay Bernard's poems of
witness and poetic gospel, which . . . create myths, legends, and
folklore that render black bodies as holy
*Malika Booker, author of Pepper Seed*
Caleb Femi's Poor bristles with the exhilarations and violences of
boyhood and adolescence. In its interplay of image and text, of
photographic image and poetic image, the book asks us to consider
what is seen and unseen, spoken of and concealed; what is, in one
of many numinous phrases, "proof of light". More than this, these
are poems of witness, both noun and verb: poems of the self and
what the self can bear
*Stephen Sexton, author of If All the World and Love Were
Young*
Giving a mythic resonance to communal life, the poems in Caleb
Femi's Poor are vital, confronting and electric. Political,
spiritual, formally inventive and energized by a music of protest
and grief, this is a rare and anthemic debut
*Seán Hewitt, author of Tongues of Fire*
An urban romantic . . . powerful
*Dazed & Confused*
Caleb's talent calls for a global stage
*Virgil Abloh*
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