Kirjahaku

'Atmospheric and intoxicating â?¦ The Wickedest is a heady night in the dance' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS Caleb Femi returns with a landmark, life-affirming new poetry collection, The Wickedest.

WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTIONChosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBCShortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeLonglisted for the Jhalak Prize'Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful ... a landmark debut' Guardian'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me' Michaela Coel'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy' Max Porter'Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year)'It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation' Terrance HayesWhat is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground?In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and one of The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2024" 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.

Winner of the Forward Prize and chosen as a Book of the Year by The Guardian and the BBC, a career-launching collection combining poetry and photography that explores the hopes and hazards of being young and Black in South London. What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at thirteen because "you fit the description of a man"--and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams, and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first-century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of towering concrete walls and fast-gentrifying neighborhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and exalts the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. A sensation upon its 2020 release in England, Poor is a tribute to the world that shaped the singular voice of this poet, and to the people finding the magic amid the difficulties they face. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: "I have never loved anything the way I love the endz."