What is it like to grow up in a place where poverty and criminalization lay the roadmap to maturity through trap houses and gang violence; where a teenage boy can be shot dead by another teenage boy at a funeral; 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'; 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 - the 'urban romantic' who 'dispel s the myths that the greatest English poets are now dead' (Dazed) - combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, hopes and dreams of young Black boys growing up in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls, abandoned houses and gentrifying neighbourhoods that forms their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas to which the South London of his youth was home, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists - foremost among them Giggs - who spoke to and from their lives even as they were living them.
Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped the 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.'
