The Wickedest

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.