“The light is pinstriped and scarce / but your eyes see everything: / particles in the air—colliding nebulas, / the sandcastle in the centre of the dance.”

Caleb Femi’s The Wickedest depicts a single night at a long-running house party in South London. Each poem is timestamped. Photos and diagrams interpenetrate. Characters, narratives, sounds, pep talks and memories, hopes and conflicts and ecstatic releases filter through an accumulation of texts and images. It is as if we readers are unfixed, reverberating, cascading soundwaves ourselves.

“the ting popped off last night / the DJ spun a tornado into the dance / & when we were in the eye of the music / the hand of God shook the room like a snow globe / & fifty-pound notes rained on us,” reads a stanza of the poem “DEFINITION,” marking 10:47 pm. “I’ve seen a rabbit caught in barbed wire / & learnt that all living things dance / edging closer to their void,” reads a bit of “Brenda dances with Jermaine” (12:05 am).

To try to recount the New York celebration of The Wickedest this Wednesday, January 29, at Bushwick’s Mood Ring is an absurd task. How does one party-write the party-writing party?

Over a crackling mike, Femi—who’d come straight from the airport—announced he was bringing “a little slice of The Wickedness from South London,” as he DJed from a secret room behind the bar.

“Have you ever seen a Bushwick venue this packed at 7:30?” asked someone as they jostled to get a drink. Jackets piled to precarious heights behind the tables. The music shifted and bounced. I slurped a mezcal soda and thought of a line from “every shoobs is another shoobs”—“you are not wallpaper”—as I tried to talk to anyone who would permit it.

Co-hosted by FSG x MCD and Document Journal, with books sold by Bushwick shop Mil Mundos, the event was a microcosm of Femi’s “immersive” nightlife vision, to use the adjective of Ben Brooks, who co-edited the book with Jackson Howard.

“I had known Caleb from his work with the late Virgil Abloh, from his directorial work on the show Industry, and from his photography,” Howard recalled. “He was somebody I needed to know, and I’m so happy to bring him here.”

Femi, who is also the author of Poor, the inaugural Young People’s Laureate for London, and a director, reflected during brief remarks that “the cornerstone of the book is literally this,” referring to the crowd gathered under the color-changing lights. “How do you understand and recognize your community if you don’t physically see people? There’s a feeling of solidarity. There’s a feeling of knowing who your community is in the texture of the room when you’re gathered together. It’s the thing that allows us to wake up the next day and find new reasons to be joyful, new reasons to thrive.”

Read an excerpt of The Wickedest.