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The poem goes on to contrast the lofty ideals of its designers with one of its most infamous episodes, the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death in a stairwell in November 2000 after being stabbed in the thigh on his way home from the local library by two brothers not much older than he was. The problem was not that the kids were unreachable, he stresses, but that he had blundered into the straitjacket of the “Gove curriculum”, in which the then education minister Michael Gove had imposed strict limits on what could be taught. If Peckham were to be remove from the content and put in Flatbush or Brownsville or Redhook or even Bedford-Stuyvesant the (lifestories) poems would speak truth to those communities.

I literally gasped/caught my breath/cried as I read Femi’s poetry collection, just as I had gasped/caught my breath/cried watching IMDY. In A Designer Talks of Home / A Resident Talks of Home, Femi overlays one viewpoint of Peckham over another, demonstrating the literal and figurative ways in which the poor have been silenced and buried, bulldozed to make space for market forces. By 12 he had been identified as a high achiever capable of boosting his school’s league table ratings by taking GCSEs early. Soft and caressing at parts, angry and demanding at others: there is a perfect balance here of emotion and issue. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Femi gives us, in his photography; bodies and blocks, the geometry of the council estate, the racial trauma but also the joy in the endz. When I read Femi’s great first collection of poetry, I tremble at the genius, and tear up at the sight of his testimonial. Femi dedicates his poem “How to pronounce: Peckham” to Damilola Taylor, a name once known to all Londoners, and beyond, when he was killed at the painfully young age of ten. I May Destroy You and Poor foreground those stories criminally overlooked, neglected or silenced in media and literature (arguably also in society more widely).

Meanwhile, the BBC London news portrays these young people only through tales of knife crime and gangs, without thinking about what it might be, to be black and British and a boy, walking to school or home, through the inner city, with no-one to protect you apart from your own self. While Coel was brought up in a predominantly working-class housing estate in Aldgate, Femi arrived in the UK from Nigeria at age seven, to live with his parents on London’s North Peckham Estate. A few months later the mural was demolished, along with the tower block where the Femi family lived, and they were moved to a four-bedroom terrace house down the road. But there is no shortage of ways to use distinct poems within the collection with classes ranging from BGE to Senior Phase.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. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. 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.

IMDY and Poor exist as the means through which their creator tries to make sense of the utterly senseless in their lives. Gallivanting, really, falling in love with girls, immersing myself in other things like music,” he says. 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. He has written and directed short films for the BBC and Channel 4, and poems for Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and more.The bespectacled 28-year-old, who sits across a table from me in the deserted cafe of a theatre near his south London home, is astonished when I remark on how dark I found the collection. I have walked the deliberately and carelessly unnamed streets of the estates, I have crossed the A roads to get to the KFC, I have stared up at block after block after block. 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. 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" .