One of The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2024

"[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.

BIO

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.

REVIEWS

"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

"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

‘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

"[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

[P]  MCD  /  January 21, 2025

0.37" H x 7.83" L x 5.24" W (0.44 lbs) 96 pages