The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the structural disadvantages of being poor and urban, he points out. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I literally gasped/caught my breath/cried as I read Femi’s poetry collection, just as I had gasped/caught my breath/cried watching IMDY.

In a poem entitled “Survivor’s Guilt, or Anikulapo” he spells out the emotional toll taken by the deaths that were part of ordinary life for anyone who grew up on the estate: “My presence at funerals felt like bragging … I am a museum of all / The ghosts I could have been. The pictures were necessary for two reasons, he says – firstly because the collection carries an archival responsibility, but also because he wanted to police the imaginations of readers whose attitude to urban black youth is shaped and coloured by news photography.This book flows from the fabric of boyhood to the politics and architecture of agony, from the material to the spiritual, always moving, always real.

For sixth-form, he took himself off to school in north London, making use of the 50-minute bus journey to catch up with his reading and all the latest albums. A few decades ago, this would have seemed unimaginable; and Femi unreservedly reminds the reader of the brutality of poverty that has shaped the endz.In Coping, he encapsulates the fear that black boys feel when playing out, when the rest of the world pretends to be scared by them, Dark skin boys scare everything in the dark / though really / we’re just trying to scare away the dark. 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 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.I didn’t have the best experience of school growing up, but there was still space for your imagination and your individualism to at least stretch its legs a little bit. I am exhausted by the BBC’s continuing charade that black masculinity can only be represented through violence. 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. The bespectacled 28-year-old, who sits across a table from me in the deserted cafe of a theatre near his south London home, is astonished when I remark on how dark I found the collection. But there is no shortage of ways to use distinct poems within the collection with classes ranging from BGE to Senior Phase.