Book Review: ‘The Wickedest,’ by Caleb Femi

“The Wickedest” is a scattering of electricities. The dancing is all impulse and appetite, with a DJ who occasionally breaks in to announce something comic like:

shout-out to the lovers in the house
big up the couple lipsing by the window
you lot been there all night though
you’re blocking the breeze please kiss somewhere else.

Dancing has been referred to as a vertical manifestation of a horizontal intention. Reading Femi on churning bodies put me in mind of an intentionally dowdy bit of A.R. Ammons’s verse: “Swing! / your partner, / promenade (and when / you can / get laid / get laid).”

The house party is a way to flee the realities of difficult lives, to enter “this secret city of flair.” The reader is made aware of cramped living conditions, of poverty, of “the asbestos of worry.” One character waits for his direct deposit to hit at midnight. Another, while at home, wears AirPods to drown out his uncle’s sobs.

This book’s sonnets and scattered monologues throw out images that stick with you: smudges of makeup on a T-shirt, breakfast cereal eaten with cooking oil, lists of lies people tell at parties (“Link up soon”), certain curated playlists, the way humor keeps your abs in shape.

Femi’s last book of poems, “Poor,” was about life in the sprawling North Peckham Estate, grim public housing where he spent his childhood. One senses similar tall and anonymous concrete housing in “The Wickedest,” for example when the narrator announces, “Dancing is your body falling from a skyscraper / and suddenly learning flight.”

Femi is also a filmmaker and photographer, and his bold images attend the text. The photos alone in “Poor” are worth the price of admission. In that book, he observes:

When hipsters take selfies
on the corners where our
friends died, the rent goes up.

He writes, “an angel is anyone who visits the desperate with news.” His verse is in constant conversation with musicians and with other poets. Femi smuggles in this line from “The Sobbing School,” by Joshua Bennett: “Lord, if you be / at all, be / a blade.”