The Wickedest by Caleb Femi (4th Estate, £14.99)
Hypnotic and freewheeling, the follow-up to the Forward-winning Poor constructs a communal memoir of a typical night at a monthly house party known as “The Wickedest”. Femi’s multimedia project includes photos, floorplan of the clubhouse, an illustrated tutorial on “destruction dance”, a police risk assessment form, a manifesto of DJ principles, text messages between partygoers and myriad poetic forms. “We danced or / I wrestled a flame for oxygen”. The book captures the sensual chaos of dance and the sociopolitical dynamics of a clubhouse culture where Black working-class communities share a common rhythm of grief and euphoria. Femi’s lines capture the “ebb and flow of community spirit” and a more personal voice: “My generation are digital hoarders – / hypocrisy is a well-fitting glove.” There are fun, satirical poems including one called Boris Johnson came to the shoobs (uninvited): “Maybe he came here for cleansing, / to lower the cholesterol of grief, / feast on the ebullience of the mandem.” “We sing, / half-making up the lyrics”, Femi writes, and Wickedest celebrates the process of making and making up when art confronts change.
Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus (Picador, £10.99)
Antrobus’s fourth collection taps into the age-old subject of parental anxiety in our troubled world. Adopting a casual rhythm, the two long autobiographical poems address his child before and after birth, from the perspective of a loving and dutiful father: “I burp and feed you and bounce and read and sing and nothing / gives you rest your cries tear air I hold you up / my mind a swung bell.” Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy, taking us to Oklahoma, New York, a gender-neutral restroom, Bloomsbury Square, Cape Town, and the Serpentine Gallery. The familiar details – sleep deprivation, name-choosing, baby-monitors – loom large. Themes of deafness, sign language and heritage prevail, as the poet remembers his father: “He was / a man of vague poetic-sounding sayings, / allowed himself a looseness, a non-commitment / to specificity.” While Antrobus is committed to life’s specificity, there is looseness in the book as it mulls over the conflict between belonging and unbelonging, the joy of a new life and a world disfigured by prejudice.
