I read Poor the first time without stopping and the second with deep gulping pauses and a rawness cutting through me. Femi’s writing is spectacular. His lyricism and candor carries you through the turbulence of growing up on the North Peckham estate.
That’s what it feels like to be Black here: like you’re dead & alive at the same time
— Schrodinger’s black
In this collection of poetry and photography, Femi grieves, celebrates, and pays homage to the environment that shaped his upbringing, unafraid to tackle the slow gentrification of South London and its impact on black working class residents.
When hipsters take selfies
on the corners where our
friends died, the rent goes up.
— On Magic / Violence
Where British media is silent and cautious, Poor gushes with a polyphony of voices that drag the racist legacy of this country into the light. By capturing his experiences in his own language, Femi rewrites a narrative that has often been ignored or defamed by the mainstream.
That in this chapter of British violence
the nation shivers
with its face hidden
when questions are asked:
of the dead: aren’t you satisfied?
of the living: aren’t you grateful?
— The Six
Every inch of my copy is littered with comments, scribbles, and rabid underlining. This collection is colossal, a monument to life as a young black boy in South London. Here, the subjects of Femi’s poetry and photography are nurtured and preserved.
Breathe in
chaos, & breathe out my soft limbs
— Concrete (V):
Second Anniversary
I struggle to know what I need to say about these poems—they speak for themselves. All I want to do is take the book and press it into every open hand that will listen.
We browse through the catalogues of anarchy,
underline moments in history, and conclude
that everybody wants to go home.
— Gentle Youth
Gang signs or prayers –
what one cannot solve the other surely will.
My fingers are bilingual like that.
— Survivor’s Guilt, or Anikulapo
There are moments that I can’t quite let go of:
I am a museum of all
the ghosts I could have been.
— Survivor’s Guilt, or Anikulapo
That’s it, that’s everything I have,
build me a looping dream of
October’s quenching tongue
— Ode to South Ldn Gyaldem
Others where the grief is so palpable I could spend days wrestling with the words:
that night we went to chew on the pitchfork of war
so that our grief as if it were a rotting tooth
would be plucked out
— Concrete (III)
You will question if you have always been
an empty cove waiting to be filled by another boy’s rage
— East Dulwich Road
And one of my favourite opening lines from a poem:
A light crawls through the window and folds in on itself
to kneel beside a boy at prayer in a South London police cell.
— Two Bodies Caught in One Cell
In Poor, Caleb Femi manages to write about a collective in the most intimate way, and he leaves us with this final impression – where there is brutality and loss, there is also found family and tender love for community. I am very much in the grasp of this collection and will always return to it.