My Direct Debits Hit at Midnight

Rhian Sasseen considers party-writing in Caleb Femi’s latest poetry collection, “The Wickedest.”

By Rhian SasseenJune 25, 2025

• Poetry

A CERTAIN NERVOUSNESS—the jittery jangle of high expectations. The host or hostess worries whether anyone will show up. Guests ready themselves before the mirror. Wonder if they’ll know anyone there. Moments before the long night’s beginning, a hundred possibilities stand open: here is a portal into another dimension, a chance to step inside a parallel universe comprised purely of sociability. A room filled with people talking. People dancing.

A party takes the shape of those who enter it, itself a character with a personality composed of chance, place, the crowd (so different from one you might encounter on the street). In literature, parties often serve as a narrative excuse: for characters to bump and converge into one another, for plot points to get underway or hurry up. “Parties,” the poet Elisa Gabbert observed in a 2019 essay on the subject, “are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically.” In other words: They’re a fishbowl. There is a certain glamour associated with seeing and being seen from all angles, the ephemerality of the experience. For one night, for a few hours (a few pages), you might meet someone new. Beneath the room’s collective gaze, you might become a different version of yourself—you could become part of the story too.

It is this sense of possibility, of escape and shifting identity, that is the subject of the Nigerian British poet Caleb Femi’s thrillingly panoramic new book of poetry, The Wickedest. Named after a fictional underground house party in London, Femi’s collection darts and dances in and out of the viewpoints of the party’s attendees, enlisting his readers on a communal journey beginning at 10:45 p.m. and ending at 4:45 in the morning. The result is multifaceted and polyphonous in its scope: the voices and experiences of The Wickedest’s guests—their personalities and politics—are pinned down in this single, distinct moment, producing an arc and satisfaction akin to that of a short story.

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The Wickedest arrives as the idea, the concept itself, of “the party” has become something of a miniature trend in English-speaking pop culture. Or at least one specific idea of the party—that of the rave. In her memoir Health and Safety: A Breakdown (2024), New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt casts an eye toward the rise of the 2010s rave scene in Brooklyn (concentrated around clubs like Nowadays and Bossa Nova Civic Club), tying their heyday to a particular kind of pre-2020 innocence. That year, in turn, saw the publication of an English-language translation by Adrian Nathan West of the German writer Rainald Goetz’s autofictional exploration of nineties techno culture, Rave. The poet Aria Aber’s recent debut novel, Good Girl, centers around scenes of clubbing (at, for instance, the infamous Berlin nightclub, Berghain). British pop stars Charli XCX and FKA Twigs have, in their ubiquitous latest albums—brat (2024) and EUSEXUA (2025), respectively—brought clubbing back to the pop charts, continuing the work of artists like Azealia Banks who, over a decade ago, started incorporating a pop spin on nineties house music in their work. For years, now, people in cities the world over (with a heavy emphasis on my fellow millennials) have found catharsis, inspiration, and fun on the dance floor, and our literature, art, and music has reflected this accordingly.

The Wickedest is a timely and suggestive contribution to this canon. In Femi’s poems, as at every good party, enigmatic figures wink in and out from the sidelines, surfacing and resurfacing at unexpected moments on the dance floor as one-liners stream around them. The party’s organizer, Lala, appears multiple times: “She saw herself more as a custodian of good times than a party organiser,” goes a line in one prose stanza (a paragraph, really) toward the book’s beginning. In one of her later appearances, Lala watches her ex-boyfriend dancing with a woman named Brenda. Brenda goes on to give a pep talk to a man named Abu. A DJ intermittently interrupts the action with shout-outs. Two characters, Max and Shelly, dance alone, until they begin dancing with each other. And the various characters’ consciousnesses merge with that of the party: looking at his reflection in the mirror, Max recites a sonnet, averring that “in blackness the room looks like a nightclub. / I look like a nightclub.”

Notably, The Wickedest offers a specific kind of night out: a predominantly Black, British one. “The Wickedest itself is like an amalgamation of all the different parties I’ve gone to, but also those I’ve imagined as well,” Femi told The Floor Magazine in 2024. This cut-up, collage-like quality between the real and the imagined is visible in how he approaches the book’s form—which is markedly different and more experimental than, say, Witt’s memoir or Aber’s novel. One of the book’s most interesting innovations is the way Femi approaches the space, which, as I read the collection, I began to think of as horizontally.

A common feature of narrative arts (books, films, and so on) is their ability to leapfrog through time and space within the span of a page, a few choice shots. The Wickedest doesn’t do this. By focusing on one fictional night, Femi creates a sharp sense of spatial awareness. Reading, one really feels as if they are walking through and observing a cacophonous room. Ephemera scatters across the pages: photographs of people dancing, paperwork to be filled out for a party’s official promotion, blueprints of rooms waiting to be filled. This horizontal quality suffuses the book’s representation of time too: instead of building backstory into his characters’ lives, Femi chooses to portray only a glimpse, a time-constrained snapshot of who they are now, in one immediate, localized moment after another. This constraint is, in many ways, liberating: rather than contract or compress, the book’s lines and stanzas diffuse themselves into a pace and rhythm that expand outward, absorbing and integrating the voices and keepsakes of the outside, ongoing world.

It’s an elegant way to approach the question of temporality, a century after modernism began to rip previous understandings apart: there are no flashbacks or flash-forwards, and even dips into differing interiorities concentrate, for the most part, within the present tense. By focusing so completely on the rise and fall of a singular time and setting, Femi offers a refreshing, multitudinous approach to writing the sheer sense of presence peculiar to parties, the ways in which minutes and hours crystallize, expand, and contract.

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The Wickedest is highly aware of itself as a book: “Where are we?” asks a disembodied line. “Marginalia,” answers the next. The book is also highly aware of exterior realities. That word—“marginalia”—encapsulates, in its five syllables, a political understanding. Even in the relative cocoon of a secret house party, the outside world intrudes; the idea of a nation, and its relationship to its citizenry—which members exist safe inside of it, and which are instead relegated to its margins—takes on a particular importance. “How does a country form?” asks a line toward the book’s beginning, before it connects this idea to the pleasures of music: “I play a song. / And you say: oh shit this is my choon.” Overheard snatches of conversation speak of everyday concerns: “this fucked country / my direct debits hit at midnight / the cost of living.” Politicians themselves, the ones whose policies create and shape these kinds of material concerns, are invoked frequently: one poem, titled “Boris Johnson came to the shoobs (uninvited),” references the series of parties that the United Kingdom’s then–prime minister illegally attended during the pandemic. (“During the pandemic, when public health restrictions prohibited most gatherings,” explains a helpful note, printed directly beneath the poem’s title, for those of us not from the UK, “Prime Minister Boris Johnson allegedly attended 17 parties.”)

The word “party” itself carries additional political implications. A poem occurring at 2:45 a.m., “Famous Party Lies,” enumerates some of these. Some of the lies are, indeed, simply the tales told on a night out: “If it’s lit on Instagram stories it’ll be lit when you get there,” advises one. “Link up soon,” goes another. Other listed lies introduce a broader, more systemic critique: “For the many, not the few,” reads one, a Labour Party slogan associated with Jeremy Corbyn and the 2017 election. “Forward, together,” reads another, the Conservative Party’s slogan for the same electoral year.

The cheerful, almost banal vagueness of these political rallying cries stands out next to the specificity of the other party lies: “There aren’t no party like an S Club party,” reads the line after them, a reference to the 1999 eponymous pop song by the group S Club 7. To the millennial ear, there is bitter irony here. What exactly, these moments of faded optimism seem to ask the reader, can the shallow promises of increasingly partisan political parties of today’s industrialized nations offer the young, compared to the gleaming dreams offered up by pop culture anthems nearly 30 years old? For me, reading as a millennial, these nostalgic elements provoke reflection on what has—or hasn’t—fundamentally changed 25 years into the new millennium.

Despite—or perhaps in response to—these shifts, here our generation is: in London, in Berlin and Bushwick, dancing until 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 a.m. Why? Are we still, in a way, indulging in the same kind of escapism many music critics and bloggers attributed to the rise of the “party rock” anthems of the late 2000s and early ’10s, when the omnipresence of the recession and bad news led millennials to dance until they blacked out as a way of coping? “Gen Z laugh at us,” Femi writes toward the end of The Wickedest, acknowledging this generational divide, “cos we wore business attire to the club, / attempting to fit the mould of a worthy reveller.” But part of the pleasures of the dance floor, his book demonstrates, are the ways in which it ultimately dissolves all differences, social, political, or otherwise. In a dark room, bodies blur, identities break. Increasingly, as the economic futures of both Europe and the United States become, once again, fragile in a way that—in light of renewed global possibilities of collapse, political repression, and instability—brings to mind the events of 2020, of 2008, this escapist quality becomes more and more attractive. An alluring feel of semi-unreality: In the club, we’re all characters.