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I love the formal experimentation in the 'Designer Talks of a Home / Resident Talks of Home' poems, & the 'Concrete' sequence is incredible. Femi has such a deft voice at times – a middling poem will suddenly swell up with such control that it becomes visceral. like in 'Cold': 'what more could torment the endz / when its spine already pokes from concrete?'

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. In a way, this book is the poet's coming-of-age, paying tribute to the people from his surroundings that lead difficult lives. ⁠This review is a case of tough love (see * at the end of the review), but I think I am being fair. The issues here, for me, are those typical of a young debut author — inconsistency. 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. Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year) The problem is, most of the remaining poems were not as compelling to me (1-2*). It's strange to 'rate' a lived experience and a cultural history, but at one point we must, and for me it comes down to whether the language or ideas conveyed are gripping and thoughtful. 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.

Poor is a debut poetry collection like no other. I not only enjoyed it, but learned a lot in the process. ⁠ From 2014 to 2016 Femi taught English at a secondary school in Tottenham. [2] In 2016 he was chosen as the first young people's laureate for London. [4] On 30 July 2020, he published his debut poetry collection, entitled Poor, [5] which won the Forward Prize's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in October 2021. [6] Filmography [ edit ]

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Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC At the time of writing this review I am in the 1% of GoodReads readers who have given this less than a 3* rating. So as a preface for this review it's worth keeping in mind my views are probably not reflective of the typical readership. However, in my defense, I do really enjoy reading poetry and lived in London for a few years, so I really did come to this thinking I'd enjoy it. Femi performs at Mulberry’s ‘My Local’ Festive Event, November 2019. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images/Mulberry From my reading, here are the poems I really enjoyed (that I'd be thinking of at least 4* material):

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.” I've already mentioned one other poet, Anna Akhmatova, but this collection also reminded of something Ilya Kaminsky wrote in Deaf Republic: so, so many gems here. it's not quite no-skips for me but it's close. the photography throughout as well, gorgeous. 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?”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.” Flood, Alison (3 October 2016). "Poet Caleb Femi named first young people's laureate for London". The Guardian . Retrieved 14 December 2020. Femi is a film-maker and photographer as well as a poet, and he became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. Scattered through the text are his own photos, which range from happy family gatherings to police crime scenes, from the geometric spines of multi-storey staircases to near abstract plays of brilliant light, and shadowy portraits of youths in hoodies. 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?

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