One of The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2024
"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
"Caleb Femi is a gift to us all from the storytelling gods. He is a poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy." --Max Porter, author of Shy 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.
