Skip to main content

Caleb Femi: 'Henceforth I’m solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy'

The poet, film-maker, photographer and former young people’s laureate for London talks about growing up on the North Peckham estate and his debut collection, Poor

Every Monday when Caleb Femi was a young boy in the 1990s, the walkways in the housing estate where he lived with his parents and four siblings were swabbed down with a detergent that smelled of bubblegum. 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. “Mondays were my favourite days.”

London’s North Peckham estate takes centre-stage in his debut poetry collection, Poor, which has been hailed as “stunning” and “revelatory”, gathering advance praise from a stream of fans including British screenwriter and actor Michaela Coel and the American political sonneteer Terrance Hayes.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jF6WQ4

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c