Poor

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As part of the unit, use extracts from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2019) as the basis of a RUAE paper. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Doesn’t seem to fit right, against the rooftop bars of Frank’s and the Chronic Love Foundation rt Lounge. 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. Trauma is a Warm Bath’ is the piece that hit me the hardest, and I’m sure readers will have their own one that follows them around for a while after.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. There are moments throughout that hit you with full force; the book certainly stays with you after completion.

I May Destroy You and Poor foreground those stories criminally overlooked, neglected or silenced in media and literature (arguably also in society more widely). I wanted to challenge that discourse – to point out that young boys wearing hoodies don’t carry this innate threat within themselves. Where Coel uses her platform to explore sexual consent, Femi uses his poetry to explore social injustice and systemic racism. 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.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 . The name of the boy that now feels unmentionable, as if harking back to a bad war we are all ashamed of.

A book of poetry and photography detailing life in Peckham – a council estate in London – as a poor Black boy, Poor is one of the more evocative and haunting (-ly beautiful) reads of 2020. Every good thing that happened on the estate was slammed into conjunction with that mural,” he says.London dialects blend into classical lines as if the narrative voice has one foot in London and one in the midst of the Muses. Though autobiographical anecdotes are threaded through the collection, the relationship of his work to his own life story is not straightforward. Femi is interdisciplinary, rejecting the genre-specific paradigms art is usually shoved into to hit sales targets. 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. On the back of his puffer coat, the word “FANTASTIC” is printed in large white capital letters, and for a split second it shines out from the darkness after Femi himself has disappeared.

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. By 12 he had been identified as a high achiever capable of boosting his school’s league table ratings by taking GCSEs early. 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 . The imagery is so visceral – and the writing so powerful – that you can feel yourself there, hovering over tragedy and concrete. 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.In Coping, he encapsulates the fear that black boys feel when playing out, when the rest of the world pretends to be scared by them, Dark skin boys scare everything in the dark / though really / we’re just trying to scare away the dark.