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? As a language professional, I especially enjoyed reading the vernacular used in the poems and this, alongside playing with different formats, speaks to Caleb Femi's particular talent. ⁠ From my reading, here are the poems I really enjoyed (that I'd be thinking of at least 4* material): I've already mentioned one other poet, Anna Akhmatova, but this collection also reminded of something Ilya Kaminsky wrote in Deaf Republic: Femi performs at Mulberry’s ‘My Local’ Festive Event, November 2019. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images/Mulberry

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.' His two-year tenure as young people’s laureate coincided with one of London’s most horrifying urban design disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he writes, in a diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?” so, so many gems here. it's not quite no-skips for me but it's close. the photography throughout as well, gorgeous. Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC As I was reading this brilliant debut collection I found myself thinking of Anna Akhmatova, which may be a surprise to everyone who has read this collection. But I was thinking particularly of those famous lines in Requiem:once when there was no football to survive / the silence I told him I dreamt a prophecy / & began to prophesy every unescaped thing in his throat / things that made him afraid of him & me for knowing & / speaking it all out into the world when I no longer knew / what to say I coughed up a half-eaten eyeball & told him it / was just my hay fever playing up again.' The problem is, most of the remaining poems were not as compelling to me (1-2*). It's strange to 'rate' a lived experience and a cultural history, but at one point we must, and for me it comes down to whether the language or ideas conveyed are gripping and thoughtful. He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over. Their circumstances were still difficult and he knows all about going to school hungry, he says. “Dinner time was when we ate.” But grim though the estate was, it fed his imagination in unexpected ways. When he was 10, a mysterious mural appeared on a wall. Nobody today can remember exactly what it looked like except that it radiated bright colours across the concrete, and became a gathering point for the community. “Every good thing that happened on the estate was slammed into conjunction with that mural,” he says. “It birthed so much beautiful folklore: there were stories of people running through walls, or turning into cats – because of that painting, everything that you would find in Harry Potter already existed on my estate before I even knew about the books.” I love the formal experimentation in the 'Designer Talks of a Home / Resident Talks of Home' poems, & the 'Concrete' sequence is incredible. Femi has such a deft voice at times – a middling poem will suddenly swell up with such control that it becomes visceral. like in 'Cold': 'what more could torment the endz / when its spine already pokes from concrete?'

Femi is a film-maker and photographer as well as a poet, and he became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. Scattered through the text are his own photos, which range from happy family gatherings to police crime scenes, from the geometric spines of multi-storey staircases to near abstract plays of brilliant light, and shadowy portraits of youths in hoodies.At the time of writing this review I am in the 1% of GoodReads readers who have given this less than a 3* rating. So as a preface for this review it's worth keeping in mind my views are probably not reflective of the typical readership. However, in my defense, I do really enjoy reading poetry and lived in London for a few years, so I really did come to this thinking I'd enjoy it.

Armitstead, Claire (30 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Henceforth I'm solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 16 November 2020. Caleb Femi (born 1990) is a British-Nigerian author, film-maker, photographer, and former young people's laureate for London. His debut poetry collection, Poor, was awarded a Forward Prize for Poetry. In a way, this book is the poet's coming-of-age, paying tribute to the people from his surroundings that lead difficult lives. ⁠ a b c Peirson-Hagger, Ellen (28 October 2020). "Caleb Femi: 'Poetry is the art of the people' ". New Statesman . Retrieved 14 December 2020. I can't emphasise enough how good this collection is. There were so many moments where I found myself stopping to think about what I'd just read because it had got under my skin. It's a collection that makes you feel as well as think though.

This review is a case of tough love (see * at the end of the review), but I think I am being fair. The issues here, for me, are those typical of a young debut author — inconsistency. Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year) Some of the poems are difficult to penetrate, written in a coded language; others are more accessible, but all of them serve as a testament to a neighbourhood-worth generation of boys in all of its specificity. ⁠