POOR: Nicki Heinen revisits Caleb Femi’s prize-winning collection from a few years ago
Poor
Caleb Femi
Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780141992150
160pp £10.99
Is poverty funny? In this brilliant first collection, Femi aims at dismantling racist untruths, and with this, uncovers suffering and combats ignorance. Femi has a prestigious body of work, including work as a photographer and film maker. His debut collection ‘Poor’ came out in 2020, and garnered the Forward prize for best first collection. He was the first young person’s laureate for London in 2016.
He understands and speaks of difficult situations, and what he makes of them is winningly, dryly, acute. In “Things I Have Stolen”, he identifies the extant bitterness of crime and grief, and transmutes sadness into universal truth: ‘So I stole the flavour from water / and I stole the solar eclipse.’
It is rare for a poetry collection to be such a page-turning delight from start to finish; the body of the wit and lyricism is essentially transformational. Anger turns to brave comedy and cathartic emotion. “Boys in Hoodies”, a questioning of violence and misunderstanding, appreciates the importance of humour, ‘and the money was in his socks?’ Urban forests of dried leaves and concrete become muses despite their imagistic poverty. Caleb’s lyricism sings through.
Disgust at intolerable and stupid cruelty is balanced with insight and inner strength. The photography within the collection’s pages is both stylish and aesthetically powerful, and makes visual sense of a problematic and sort-of twisted reality.
“Thirteen” opens with a line of alarm and injustice:
You will be four minutes from home
when you are cornered by an officer
who will tell you of a robbery, forty
minutes ago in the area.
Past trauma channelled – police brutality to become an extinct history (we hope).
The importance of this graceful and searching collection shouldn’t be in question. In conversation with Jack Solloway in The London Magazine, Femi says: ‘As an individual, you expect nothing anymore. You do it for the bigger causality, the bigger need, or the integrity of your community.’ This sounds good, I think. Femi’s gripping collection speaks of generosity and respect of the community, amidst the fight for justice. Such beauty in verse, a reading treasured. I look forward to future work by Femi, a bright star of the literary landscape.
Dec 3 2024
POOR
POOR: Nicki Heinen revisits Caleb Femi’s prize-winning collection from a few years ago
Is poverty funny? In this brilliant first collection, Femi aims at dismantling racist untruths, and with this, uncovers suffering and combats ignorance. Femi has a prestigious body of work, including work as a photographer and film maker. His debut collection ‘Poor’ came out in 2020, and garnered the Forward prize for best first collection. He was the first young person’s laureate for London in 2016.
He understands and speaks of difficult situations, and what he makes of them is winningly, dryly, acute. In “Things I Have Stolen”, he identifies the extant bitterness of crime and grief, and transmutes sadness into universal truth: ‘So I stole the flavour from water / and I stole the solar eclipse.’
It is rare for a poetry collection to be such a page-turning delight from start to finish; the body of the wit and lyricism is essentially transformational. Anger turns to brave comedy and cathartic emotion. “Boys in Hoodies”, a questioning of violence and misunderstanding, appreciates the importance of humour, ‘and the money was in his socks?’ Urban forests of dried leaves and concrete become muses despite their imagistic poverty. Caleb’s lyricism sings through.
Disgust at intolerable and stupid cruelty is balanced with insight and inner strength. The photography within the collection’s pages is both stylish and aesthetically powerful, and makes visual sense of a problematic and sort-of twisted reality.
“Thirteen” opens with a line of alarm and injustice:
Past trauma channelled – police brutality to become an extinct history (we hope).
The importance of this graceful and searching collection shouldn’t be in question. In conversation with Jack Solloway in The London Magazine, Femi says: ‘As an individual, you expect nothing anymore. You do it for the bigger causality, the bigger need, or the integrity of your community.’ This sounds good, I think. Femi’s gripping collection speaks of generosity and respect of the community, amidst the fight for justice. Such beauty in verse, a reading treasured. I look forward to future work by Femi, a bright star of the literary landscape.