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.
"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"
