Poor

By: Caleb Femi

Narrated by: Caleb Femi

Brought to you by Penguin.

What 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 explores the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in 21st-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.'

©2020 Caleb Femi (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"An urban romantic...powerful." (Dazed & Confused)

"A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy." (Max Porter)