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. While we’re partying a few streets away, Femi speaks of the mortality of forgotten black boys, boys robbed of their chance to become men.

In its interplay of image and text, of photographic image and poetic image, the book asks us to consider what is seen and unseen, spoken of and concealed; what is, in one of many numinous phrases, "proof of light" .I grew up in Deptford, a kind of less sexy cousin to Peckham, where Femi’s poems are mostly located. 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.

It was an example that Femi would carry with him through an English literature degree and on into a teacher training course at King’s College London, from which he went straight on to teach at a Tottenham comprehensive school. Coel, who was in full creative control of the project from start to finish, was rightfully showered in critical plaudits for her exploration of power, consent and lived experiences of black people. Home was “one bedroom and seven bodies making do” on the 13th floor of a tower block: “But all of a sudden that space was transformed by my eight-year-old imagination into a wonderland where everything felt shiny and bouncy,” he says. Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBCShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First CollectionShortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeLonglisted for the Jhalak Prize’Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful .Photograph: Aiden Harmitt-Williams/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Caleb Femi: ‘In lockdown, when we all had an hour allocated to us to go out into the fresh air, how many had access to greenery and nature? My words throughout my journey reading the poems were WOW and DAM because I know the reality of his words. 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. 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.