Poor

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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. Caleb Femi's riveting photographs and compassionate yet hard-hitting lines map North Peckham's black boys and blocks . It birthed so much beautiful folklore: there were stories of people running through walls, or turning into cats – because of that painting, everything that you would find in Harry Potter already existed on my estate before I even knew about the books. Arriving full of dreams about saving others through poetry, he had a rude awakening and quit after two years. His point, he says, is “that often these boys are just as delicate as we can ever imagine them to be.

The imagery is so visceral – and the writing so powerful – that you can feel yourself there, hovering over tragedy and concrete. Destroying me’ Michaela Coel’A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy’ Max Porter’It’s simply stunning.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. J. Harling’s fiction and non-fiction has been published in numerous online journals including Square Wheel Press, Olit, Queen Mob's Tea House and XRAY. In one, he imagines a boy pouring himself into his hood like a raindrop: “Each tree grateful for the / wet boy, unaware that the outside world sees this boy as a / chainsaw. 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. I literally gasped/caught my breath/cried as I read Femi’s poetry collection, just as I had gasped/caught my breath/cried watching IMDY.

My words throughout my journey reading the poems were WOW and DAM because I know the reality of his words.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. One of the most culturally arresting moments of this quite extraordinary year was the arrival on our screens of the BBC/HBO comedy-drama I May Destroy You. What a thing it was, to be nearly forty, having been an avid reader from childhood, and to finally find, for the first time, my home, a deprived council estate in inner-city southeast London, represented in poetry.

If I could, I would do nothing more than read Poor from start to finish with a Senior Phase class and allow Femi’s words to be absorbed and his messages to permeate. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.He showed me that there were ways in which you can love yourself and have a good time, and test yourself as well.