Poor

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Doesn’t seem to fit right, against the rooftop bars of Frank’s and the Chronic Love Foundation rt Lounge. 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.

While the BBC/HBO comedy-drama is certainly not suitable for a teenage audience, Caleb Femi’s Poor certainly is. Home was “one bedroom and seven bodies making do” on the 13th floor of a tower block: “But all of a sudden that space was transformed by my eight-year-old imagination into a wonderland where everything felt shiny and bouncy,” he says.Alternatively, implement the practical strategies offered by Alex Quigley in Closing the Reading Gap to help readers get to grips with reading social science texts. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. I have walked the deliberately and carelessly unnamed streets of the estates, I have crossed the A roads to get to the KFC, I have stared up at block after block after block. In 2015 he won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam and performed at Tate Britain, and in 2017 he was included on the Dazed 100 list of the new generation shaping youth culture.

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. It was an example that Femi would carry with him through an English literature degree and on into a teacher training course at King’s College London, from which he went straight on to teach at a Tottenham comprehensive school. Though autobiographical anecdotes are threaded through the collection, the relationship of his work to his own life story is not straightforward.A few months later the mural was demolished, along with the tower block where the Femi family lived, and they were moved to a four-bedroom terrace house down the road. I am exhausted by the BBC’s continuing charade that black masculinity can only be represented through violence. In its interplay of image and text, of photographic image and poetic image, the book asks us to consider what is seen and unseen, spoken of and concealed; what is, in one of many numinous phrases, "proof of light" . In A Designer Talks of Home / A Resident Talks of Home, Femi overlays one viewpoint of Peckham over another, demonstrating the literal and figurative ways in which the poor have been silenced and buried, bulldozed to make space for market forces.