Poor

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I don’t believe in policing the reader, but this is the one time that I broke that rule,” he says, “because all those images are doctored: they follow one gender, they’re often mug shots or pictures that communicate threats, or aggression, or misfortune or sorrow. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Nobody today can remember exactly what it looked like except that it radiated bright colours across the concrete, and became a gathering point for the community.

Femi gives us, in his photography; bodies and blocks, the geometry of the council estate, the racial trauma but also the joy in the endz. Doesn’t seem to fit right, against the rooftop bars of Frank’s and the Chronic Love Foundation rt Lounge. Femi dedicates his poem “How to pronounce: Peckham” to Damilola Taylor, a name once known to all Londoners, and beyond, when he was killed at the painfully young age of ten.I am exhausted by the BBC’s continuing charade that black masculinity can only be represented through violence.

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. If Peckham were to be remove from the content and put in Flatbush or Brownsville or Redhook or even Bedford-Stuyvesant the (lifestories) poems would speak truth to those communities. In A Designer Talks of Home / A Resident Talks of Home, Femi overlays one viewpoint of Peckham over another, demonstrating the literal and figurative ways in which the poor have been silenced and buried, bulldozed to make space for market forces. 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? I May Destroy You and Poor foreground those stories criminally overlooked, neglected or silenced in media and literature (arguably also in society more widely).

The book is more than a poetry collection: containing a selection of Femi’s striking original photography, it is an impeccably curated and often beautiful snapshot of lives lived on the North Peckham Estate.

In an interview with Vulture, Michaela Coel considered the impact of a childhood lived beside the brutalist architecture of inner city towerblocks: ‘I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation. In 2015 he won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam and performed at Tate Britain, and in 2017 he was included on the Dazed 100 list of the new generation shaping youth culture. For sixth-form, he took himself off to school in north London, making use of the 50-minute bus journey to catch up with his reading and all the latest albums. You don't even need to be a poetry fan to enjoy this, it's just exceptional stories told with heart and soul.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Though autobiographical anecdotes are threaded through the collection, the relationship of his work to his own life story is not straightforward.

Every good thing that happened on the estate was slammed into conjunction with that mural,” he says. It’s likely that Femi and I might have passed each other on the street, sat next to each other on the bus.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBCShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First CollectionShortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeLonglisted for the Jhalak Prize’Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful . While Coel was brought up in a predominantly working-class housing estate in Aldgate, Femi arrived in the UK from Nigeria at age seven, to live with his parents on London’s North Peckham Estate.