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. 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?' 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.' In a way, this book is the poet's coming-of-age, paying tribute to the people from his surroundings that lead difficult lives. ⁠ 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.

From my reading, here are the poems I really enjoyed (that I'd be thinking of at least 4* material):so, so many gems here. it's not quite no-skips for me but it's close. the photography throughout as well, gorgeous. 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. ⁠ 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.

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. 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?”I've already mentioned one other poet, Anna Akhmatova, but this collection also reminded of something Ilya Kaminsky wrote in Deaf Republic: