A friend recommended this book to me and I loved it! I hope I get to one day bear witness to his spoken word.

A beautiful exploration of black identity and family in Britain today. Would recommend for readers of Roger Robinson, Caleb Femi, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard and Claudia Rankine.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin for the chance to read and review this book!

While ultimately I didn't find this collection particularly memorable, there were some interesting pieces. I was particularly fond of 'For Man is Man and Master of Fate'. I will be re-reading this collection in the future!

A beautiful collection of poetry and vignettes on masculinity, race, and grief. I really enjoyed reading each piece.

A beautiful and powerful poetry collection of the black experience and being black in Britain.

Sode is a powerhouse with his poetry, he never shields himself away from what needs to be said, he stands up for what needs to be said and he does it so effortlessly in his poems and his writing.
From detailing experiences in his own life to moments in history, Sode has created a gem of a collection

A collection of channeled Black urban anger poems offset by a more tender series mourning the death of a female relative.

This is not a criticism but it seems to me that Sode's poetry works more effectively as oral, performance verse rather than textual, written-down verse - its complexity and power is in the emotion and ideas that are articulated with force and a directness that is about a strong voice and a pointed passion. It doesn't require the extended textual attention that the poetry of, say, [author:Derek Walcott|11562] requires with its complex multilayered allusions and intertexts, metaphors and puns and wordplay with switching modes of prosody.

What Sode does brilliantly, though, is to articulate a sense of Black urban masculinity and anxiety for our historical moment: the fear of unwarranted confrontations with the police, the institutionalised/systemic racism that offers the grace of understanding and another chance to a white 'bad boy' like Caravaggio but which is withheld from generations of Black men and women, the vile abuse suffered by public Black figures like Diane Abbott to the everyday racism of being asked to pay for a meal before it's served when the white couple at the next table are not required to do the same. Sode quotes from news stories: Stormzy, David Starkey's abusive genocide remark, Dominic Raab's ignorant comment on taking the knee, the unforgivable abuse of Bukayo Saka after the World Cup...

Alongside this political public poetry, is the series of grieving and mourning poems: emotive pieces on the mothers who learn that their young Black sons have been killed in police custody, and the narrator's own over-spilling feelings at the death of Big Mummy, made even more potent by the cultural prohibitions on Black men who cry.

This is a short collection but it feels absolutely contemporary in its fierce political engagement. It also sits well alongside [author:Caleb Azumah Nelson|20293142]'s [book:Open Water|61867029] which opens up a mode through which to articulate the emotional and vulnerable side of Black masculinity that is all too often eroded and erased by cultural stereotypes.

If the measure of a work of art or literature is the level of insight the reader gains into the artist’s world, then ‘Manorism’ succeeds supremely well. It does this because of the inventive use of language and the ability to show us the world of the writer.
In this first collection by Yomi S. Ode, a British Nigerian poet and performer, we step into Yomi’s world – a diaspora of people and places, family and friends, which stretches from Nigeria to Brixton and Dalston in London, UK. Yomi reveals this world sometimes through a style of writing which is close to a stream-of-consciousness. But rather than drifting off into a netherworld, he knows when to skilfully shift gear and to land us right back into the reality of young black men in England in the 21st Century.
This reality is often harsh and discriminatory. We learn about the corrosive prejudice of a young black man of being asked to pay for a meal at the moment of ordering it while at the same time, a couple in the same restaurant are excused this indignity. But rather than railing angrily, Yomi asserts himself and his kinship to have the right to speak and live according to their cultures and traditions.
Often the collection focuses on specific people in the family. There is a love letter to his son, the sad end of Big Mummy and the rituals for the embalming of Okonkwo. This book is rooted in the time of its writing. We come across celebrities both popular (Stormzy, Tinie Tempah), the redeemed (Ant McPartlin) and the unpopular (David Starkey, Laurence Fox). There are politicians, Diane Abbott and Dominic Raab (who, he?).
The focus of the speaker encompasses not only major issues but zooms in on the small events of the everyday. So we see the speaker at work cooking a meal, preparing okra and mackerel. But then the focus shifts and we are seeing Caravaggio and his dispute with a waiter in another time over a plate of artichokes. Caravaggio appears throughout the text as a symbol of the outsider who had to fight his corner to survive and to succeed as an artist.
These experiences and perceptions are portrayed through a wide range of linguistic devices – poems, vignettes, prose, idiomatic use of English (e.g., often dropping the th from the so the definite article is reduced to e). There are phrases and sentences which are presented in a language of Nigeria. Because of the ambition and originality of this collection, I would suggest readers read it at least three or four times so as to tune into this remarkable portrayal. This first collection is impressive while being direct and speaking to a strongly lived experience.
My thanks to NetGalley for making an advance copy available to me so that I might provide an honest and unbiased review.

Incredible poetry on black manhood.
I’ve never read something like this before but I think it is an essential read. It speaks a lot about the troubles and the experience of a black person in the UK. An angry voice on colonialism but it is so much needed.
I loved its metaphors and its images intertwined with Caravaggio.

I recommend this book for its rawness, for its rightful anger. It is such a good poetry book but I wouldn't recommend starting with this book if you’ve never read poetry before or if you’ve only read “Milk and Honey”. It is more deep and meaningful and touches more important subjects and I think you need to have a bit of experience with poetry to understand some of its experiences.

What I did not like was how I Jumped on the net galley app and on google because I had to translate some words. It just made my reading inconsistent and sometimes it would break my attention span. Otherwise, a very good book.

I read Poor by Caleb Femi earlier this summer and found myself floored by the tender confluence of black masculinity — existing both as a prison and a space for intimacy between men — alongside a history and culture of violence against black people which dehumanises and extorts them for all they can give. These poems perform that same act of alchemy, transmuting histories which are both personal and communal into poems of such strength and sentimentality that they practically bleed off of the page.