Poor

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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.

Arriving full of dreams about saving others through poetry, he had a rude awakening and quit after two years. In an interview with Vulture, Michaela Coel considered the impact of a childhood lived beside the brutalist architecture of inner city towerblocks: ‘I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation.

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.

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. IMDY and Poor exist as the means through which their creator tries to make sense of the utterly senseless in their lives. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The problem was not that the kids were unreachable, he stresses, but that he had blundered into the straitjacket of the “Gove curriculum”, in which the then education minister Michael Gove had imposed strict limits on what could be taught. Caleb has documented the journey and experiences of not just many black youths of this generation but he captures the experience of all disadvantaged youths who are full of promise, hope and talents. 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. London dialects blend into classical lines as if the narrative voice has one foot in London and one in the midst of the Muses.