The Wickedest
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker and poet Femi (Poor) spins an ecstatic story of one night in South London's underground party scene. The monthly party, or shoob, takes place in a secret location called The Wickedest, and Femi documents the event with a mix of English sonnets, prose poems, and experimental verse wrapped around photos along with running definitions of shoob ("faaji, groove, bashment, house party, owambe," and more). Among the recurring characters are Lala, the party organizer, who witnesses her ex dancing with another woman. The unexpected and uninvited participation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson prompts speculation from the revelers ("Maybe he needed to bruk out–prove his good health"; "Maybe he came to present his neck to our guillotine"). Shout-outs from the DJ provide a kaleidoscopic view of the festivities, from the lovers kissing by the window and blocking the breeze to the woman who needs to "take it easy on the oud" because it's smelling up the place and the slick-haired man who looks like he's "dipped in butter." 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.
