Indeed, Coel (whose review of Poor graces the front cover of the 2020 Penguin edition) seems to have responded in the same way to reading Femi’s book: ‘Oh my God, he’s just stirring me.

Nobody today can remember exactly what it looked like except that it radiated bright colours across the concrete, and became a gathering point for the community. In one, he imagines a boy pouring himself into his hood like a raindrop: “Each tree grateful for the / wet boy, unaware that the outside world sees this boy as a / chainsaw. 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. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Harling offers her own reaction to the poet, filmmaker, photographer and former young people’s laureate for London.What a thing it was, to be nearly forty, having been an avid reader from childhood, and to finally find, for the first time, my home, a deprived council estate in inner-city southeast London, represented in poetry. That’s something I wanted to investigate: the impact of urban landscapes in impoverished public housing areas; how it shapes the way that people who live in these spaces see themselves and how the world sees them. Soft and caressing at parts, angry and demanding at others: there is a perfect balance here of emotion and issue. Trauma is a Warm Bath’ is the piece that hit me the hardest, and I’m sure readers will have their own one that follows them around for a while after.

When I read Femi’s great first collection of poetry, I tremble at the genius, and tear up at the sight of his testimonial. He would be entered for a couple every year, with the result that, when his peers were gearing up for the exams, he only had two more to go, but was expected to show up for every lesson anyway. As part of the unit, use extracts from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2019) as the basis of a RUAE paper.In this fabulous debut, concrete becomes a paradox of toughness and vulnerability, confinement and shelter . Poor, published in 2020, is a breath-taking ode to Femi’s black boyhood lived inside the concrete blocks and walkways of the estate.