Poor: Poems

Winner of the Forward Prize and chosen as a Book of the Year by The Guardian and the BBC, a career-launching collection combining poetry and photography that explores the hopes and hazards of being young and Black in South London.

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 thirteen 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 combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams, and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first-century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of towering concrete walls and fast-gentrifying neighborhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and exalts the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.

A sensation upon its 2020 release in England, Poor is a tribute to the world that shaped the singular voice of this poet, and to the people finding the magic amid the difficulties they face. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: “I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.”