The Wickedest (Paperback)

Paperback. 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. "An immersive poetic epic taking place over one night at an underground London house party, conjured by a multi-hyphenate sensation"-- Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …