Poor

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZECHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NEW STATESMAN. , FINANCIAL TIMES. , GUARDIAN. , OBSERVER. , ROUGH TRADE AND THE BBC. 'Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful. a landmark debut'. Guardian. 'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me'. Michaela Coel'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy'. Max Porter'It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation'. Terrance HayesWhat 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. 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. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. 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. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz. '.