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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” 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.
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” 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.
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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
"Thrillingly panoramic . . . Femi's collection darts and dances in and out of the viewpoints of the party's attendees . . . The result is multifaceted and polyphonous in its scope: the voices and experiences of The Wickedest's guests"
their personalities and politics