Join us at the first ever BHM Book Club event, where we introduce 'Poor'- the landmark poetry/photography collection of Caleb Femi. 

We will be exploring his works on Wednesday 18th October from 1:30-3:30pm in the tent area of St Benet's Chaplaincy, ahead of his guest appearance in November. Please also reserve a space for this second event here.

* the first 20 respondents will be given a free copy *

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?

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. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.

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.'

'Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful' - Guardian on 'Poor'

Photography Credits to Caleb Femi