Damn. Well done!
This was phenomenal! Caleb Femi has a way with invoking the spirit of "God" while at the same time mocking him for allowing black men to die by gun violence on the streets and that's damn breathtaking. Femi also uses cynical jokes to get his points across on multiple subjects. He allows softness to contradict with the harshness of white on black violence.
There's one poem that will stick with me for a long time where Femi talks about how he was stopped as a thirteen for "looking like a man they were searching for" and one of the officers who had stopped him had spoken at his school previously about how they were all supernovas. Cops, white cops, often forget that black children are CHILDREN. And they let that racism blind them. It's disgusting. poetry like this is NEEDED.

Incredibly impressive poetry collection about the experience of a black man in England. It is tough, vulnerable, sweet, overwhelming (in a good way), and colourful. The added photographs fit so well with the descriptions within the poems. It further proves Femi's writing talent.

This book holds so much pain & violence in its dark lines. It’s a beautifully written account of growing up as a Black boy in the UK’s apartment complexes, surrounded by cement, racism, police persecution, knives and guns. I read it on the road, gulping each poem down like a stone, each one so hard & heavy. This one is for the “Boys who felt grief and its economies of scale / in the budget of burial” (Put them in the room of Spirit & Slow Time), the boys who are “supernovas” (Thirteen). An echo “when you get tired of running from danger / you become the danger”. Accompanied by photographs, often portraits of Black people, the collection gives voice & visibility & life-force to those who are often looked upon from the elite chambers.

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“When everyone called me son of a shadow
it was concrete that called me proof of light.”

(Concrete IV)

I think there's this magic in interpreting the place that raised you, in losing that place and coming back to it as an adult, through acknowledging it for what it was. So many of these words were gripping and at the same time honest, cutting to the personal of larger issues. I wish I had better words, but I felt at home in these poems despite being a girl that grew up in a trailer park in Virginia.