About the Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and one of The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2024.
Winner of the Sky Arts Award for Poetry.
"[The Wickedest is] alive in the way poetry must be." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Atmospheric and intoxicating, lyrical and inviting, The Wickedest is a heady night in the dance, and Caleb Femi is the life of the literary party." --Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie
An immersive epic taking place over one night at an underground London house party, conjured by a multi-hyphenate sensation.
Welcome to the Wickedest, the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot. You better hope you have the address: this is for locals only.
Sweaty and cinematic, pulsing with rhythm and heat, every moment here--from one-on-one intimacies to the swell of the party's collective roar--is refracted in Caleb Femi's writing. Ingeniously blending conversations, text messages, sonnets, vignettes, monologues, photos, and lyrics, The Wickedest is a modern epic, told as a minute-by-minute chronicle of an unforgettable night out.
Femi, a multi-hyphenate sensation and the author of Poor, which was called "a landmark debut for British poetry" by The Guardian, is a generational storyteller and scene setter. But The Wickedest does more than tell the story of one party; Femi uses the experience of nightlife to document the broader contexts surrounding the shoobs--the marginalization of low-income communities of color, the red tape that bars those on the edges from already shrinking communal space. Still, the party goes on. The Wickedest is a respite and a reckoning, a community of desire, care, and resistance that carries on long past the night's end.
About the Author :
Caleb Femi is a writer, director, and photographer. He is the author of the poetry collection Poor, which won the 2021 Forward Prize, was short-listed for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and was named a best book of 2020 by many publications, including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Observer, and the BBC. Femi has also directed TV episodes for HBO, the BBC, and Netflix, as well as commercials, high-fashion films, and runway shows for brands such as Louis Vuitton, TikTok, Bottega Veneta, and Dior. From 2016 to 2018 he served as Young People's Laureate for London, where he lives.
Review :
"It's got impudence and élan, and a feeling for life on the margins of English society. It's alive in the way poetry must be . . . Femi's boldness and sensitivity underscore one of the messages this intrepid collection deals out: 'What scares you makes you groove.'" --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Thrillingly panoramic . . . Femi's collection darts and dances in and out of the viewpoints of the party's attendees . . . The result is multifaceted and polyphonous in its scope: the voices and experiences of The Wickedest's guests--their personalities and politics--are pinned down in this single, distinct moment, producing an arc and satisfaction akin to that of a short story." --Rhian Sasseen, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Hypnotic and freewheeling . . . The book captures the sensual chaos of dance and the sociopolitical dynamics of a clubhouse culture where Black working-class communities share a common rhythm of grief and euphoria . . . Wickedest celebrates the process of making and making up when art confronts change." --Kit Fan, The Guardian
" A vibe-based, joyously rhythmic movement through a single night at a South London shoob (organized, underground house party), [The Wickedest is] a deeply human work, pinballing across perspectives--one exhilarating sequence shifts between a couple dancing and one of their exes spying from afar--and picking up on the small details that make these events indescribable." --Juan A. Ramirez, Vogue
"[The Wickedest] offers astute observations on the joys of rhythm and movement. The book's sonnets and scattered monologues throw out images that stick with you; the dancing is all impulse and appetite." --The New York Times, Editors' Choice
"It's very Black London, it's very thick in terms of atmosphere . . . You can really read it on a day, on the beach, and just escape into this house party, and you're feeling the feelings, and you're feeling the music because he writes in a very kind of rhythmic way as well. It's beautiful." --Bolu Babalola, NPR
'In The Wickedest, Femi draws on his skills as a photographer as well as a poet to encapsulate the house party experience in a book that's stylish and wittily curated -- complete with floor plan, screen grabs of text messages, even a "Promotion Risk Assessment Form" from London's Metropolitan Police, anarchically completed. It is fun, optimistic and beautiful to look at." --Maria Crawford, Financial Times
"Joy's the joint, the goal, the juice in The Wickedest . . . Femi's at his most winning when he tries on voices, plays around with registers, presents the Wickedest as a rhetorical scrum . . . [The Wickedest] elebrates parties--black or otherwise--as places not just to come together or to be found, but to dissolve, to be lost lost lost." --Sukhdev Sandhu, 4Columns
"An unforgettable and tender collection for anyone who doesn't want the party to end." --Alex Nierenhausen, Cult MTL
"[The Wickedest] spins an ecstatic story of one night in South London's underground party scene . . . Throughout, Femi gleefully evokes the sense of liberation found by the partygoers as they free themselves of the weight of reality. It's a blast." --Publishers Weekly
"Femi's latest . . . manages to hold an entire night inside its pages. With words, photos, and more, it takes you inside an infamous long-running house party in South London and shows you the lives of the partygoers, the ways that one can fall into the warm embrace of sound, and the joys of language all at once." --LitHub
"Wholly immersive, The Wickedest crystalizes and forever elevates bashment in this pulsing, visceral fever dream. Femi's urgent, striking lyricism and images call for us to shake loose jadedness, to recapture what it means to be alive with one another. A near-holy experience, The Wickedest should be read, reread, and studied." --Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You
"A riveting collection, bottled in a time capsule of nostalgia, and lived experience. These poems are as tender, as they are a vibe. A head nod to communities meeting in ritual. The Wickedest honours the world within a world. The henjoyment in language, and complexities in how gatherings can unfold." --Yomi Sode, author of Manorisms
"A mellifluously marvellous journey towards joy, The Wickedest pulses with Rhythm and Poetry at its most penetrating and picturesque. Caleb has constructed a jewel of a jam; glimmering, sweaty, sensual, unforgettable." --Inua Ellams, author of The Half-God of Rainfall
"The Wickedest by the young British Nigerian poet-filmmaker Caleb Femi is a mesmerizing journey through the different moments of one night's revelry. A heady mix of the formal and urbane, the sacred and mundane, the collection keeps you in suspense, making you question whether you're counting down to something or have left something significant behind. The time signatures dance unpredictably, heightening the anticipation and intrigue. The vivid pictures punctuating the book lend it a cinematic scope, immersing you in a unique cultural experience. The Wickedest is a hypnotic, experiential happening of a book--essential reading for all." --Roger Robinson, T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of A Portable Paradise
"In The Wickedest, Caleb Femi renders thrillingly tangible a world of moments in which the relationship between the DJ the riddim and the dancer is a kind of sacrament, a form of collective healing in the face of life's manifold threats to black life." --Kayo Chingonyi, author of A Blood Condition
"From its first word this is poetry that moves and is felt in the body; the poem taken from the page to the dance floor of the club. 'I've been eating sound since ice-cream van melodies, ' writes Femi. Those sounds, that movement, fill this collection." --Andrew McMillan, author of Pity
"Immersive, rapturous writing that truly transports. The Wickedest is a joyous, lyrical read that I won't soon forget, and Caleb Femi, an exceptionally talented poet." --Yomi Adegoke, author of The List
