Think of all the best parties you’ve ever been to, jumbled together and winding into one long night. Imagine running through that dreamed-up congregation hour by hour. What did it smell like? What did it feel like? Who made it possible? What, if anything, made it political? Do this, and you might have something like the framework for The Wickedest, British Nigerian writer Caleb Femi’s second poetry collection. The Wickedest is a fizzing dissection of a different kind of party politics, not concerned with SW1 policymakers, but rather with the political function of a ‘community institution’ less often taken seriously: the house party.

Named after the sprawling, semi-fictionalised event it narrates, The Wickedest is a collection that asks what it takes for a community to come together on a Friday night, and what is at stake when it does. There is less interest in the general concept of letting one’s hair down and more in the specific contours of the shoobs, an underground house party described as ‘vital within working-class communities’, particularly the black working-class community Femi comes from. Femi sketches out the politics that shape that community and — by extension — its parties. (It’s worth keeping in mind that in 2025, the house party itself is increasingly under threat, with nightlife in general subject to increasing marketisation, regulation, and even extinction.)

Throughout, Femi explicitly references a parallel-tense community history — most obviously via Form 696, the notorious Blair-era grime-quashing police initiative — alongside diverse glances at a host of material pressures, from direct debits to sleepless nights and otherwise ‘sticky days’ churning on. Yet what seems to matter more to him are the intersections between those material pressures and the resistant moves of bodies breathing, kissing, grinding.

Much of the power of The Wickedest comes from these intersections, often emerging in darkly unassuming moments, as in the uneasy realisation that ‘amapiano drum patterns sound like yassified gunshots’ and ‘what scares you makes you groove’. The mother’s heartbeat becomes the original bassline; to hear ‘ice-cream van melodies’ is to be ‘eating sound’. The collection threads together a material mythology in which a pounded front door is ‘made from centuries of our skin’; yet, for all its profundity, that mythology is robust. One poem seems to roll its own eyes: ‘[A]re you carrying soil in your Jacquemus handbag? Heirloom seeds in the heel of your sneakers?’ The Wickedest, like all the best parties, is deeply funny, too.

Parties are a conscious salve after the kind of working, waking week that is ‘greedy, fat off your misery’. Yet to position them as a pure escape from the grubby politics of the day would be reductive, a mistake this collection never makes. Instead, it captures the inseparability of day from night, and the intricate ways the body adapts to move differently through both. Femi writes that ‘dancing is your body falling from a skyscraper and suddenly learning flight’. That image is one that epitomises much of The Wickedest’s central charge, capturing the multiple things that bodies can be, even when battered by deprivation or injustice.

Bringing together poetry with photography, architectural diagrams, and screenshots, the collection can at times seem laboured, and its experiments might be read by some as gimmicks. It would be more productive, however, to read The Wickedest as a collection that dives into things unapologetically, casting out every limb in every direction, as any good kitchen dancer can. It mirrors the shoobs itself: sweaty and overinvolved.

Perhaps in tribute to the forms Femi repurposes and crafts, at the core of The Wickedest is love. This is no sentimental or naive gesture, but rather a recognition of that which most often sustains people through hardship: the meaning and solidarity we derive from other people. From school-disco shoulder touches to a couple ‘lipsing’, and late-life memories of catching a lover’s face on the stairs, it is full of intimacies, keeping in mind the fullness of ‘social politics’ and everything that term might involve.

It is not all singing and dancing. Sucker punches are delivered throughout. An imagined poetry consumer is winded: ‘reader — don’t you like us like this?’ The ‘this’ in question is ‘smelling delightful’, occupying a ‘secret city of flair’. The suggestion is that a presumed white and middle-class poetry readership might prefer to encounter a different version of Femi’s black, working-class visions.

This, for Femi, is not hypothetical, but born out of the reception to his own work. Poor, his 2020 book — a hybrid collection exploring the imaginative life of young black men in and around the North Peckham Estate — won the elite Forward Prize for best first collection and was met with broadsheet acclaim. Though Poor is a creative and formally disruptive collection, the testimony it provides inescapably feeds the appetites of those hungry for poetically rendered struggle. The Wickedest — whose sleek, minimalist cover evokes hedonistic indulgence with a dripping acid house smiley — has, however, received markedly less attention than its predecessor. This is strange, given that Femi’s style seems only to have grown in precision and confident flair.

That lack of acclaim seems to chime with a realisation that loud testimony might not be the only way. In the collection’s final lines, we find a plea:

[W]hen you leave here, do not
speak of what you saw tonight.
If the outsiders ask,
tell them you saw nothing,
no poetryor anything worth calling [art] . . .

It is a complicated ending, pointing unapologetically to the politics of gentrification, contemporary publishing, and much more. The Wickedest, in other words, not only doesn’t need the acclaim of white, middle-class tourists — it doesn’t particularly want it, either.

This isn’t to settle on exclusionism (no good party has too strict a guest list), but rather to acknowledge that the culture evoked by this collection is best left in the capable hands of those who created it. Perhaps it is best that those final lines are held in mind by largely ‘outsider’ reviewers who might too easily think that The Wickedest craves approval. In reality, our invitation was for one night only.The others will be back next week, dancing through what life throws at them, regardless.