It was a sticky night at the lower east side menswear store “Le Pere,” where dozens of downtown New York’s sceney regulars filled the room to see the viral phenomenon “Woah Vicky” read her original poems. Publicist Mitchell Jackson has a nose for this generation’s enfants terribles – besides Vicky herself, a few of his clients dotted the crowd, including playwright Matt Gasda and the memoirist Caroline Calloway. The reading drew the usual familiar faces, including celebrity photographer Matthew Weinberger, Byline co-founder Gutes Guterman, and writers Mackenzie Thomas and Michael Crumplar.
Woah Vicky, the marquee reader of the evening, is a 26-year-old influencer from Miami, who first became famous as a teenager for a string of racial controversies and celebrity feuds. In recent years, however, she’s become a born-again Christian, lately surfacing in the public eye for her sweet on-camera interactions with the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular. She is best known to the downtown New York audience for her singular typo-ridden tweeting style, often drawing from scripture to make a point about the difficulties of a life walking with the Lord.
‘My poem on Kamala Harris,’ announced Vicky. ‘Kamala is a witch.’ The crowd screamed
I asked a girl next to me what she thought of Vicky. “No religious woman dresses like that,” she snorted derisively, referencing Vicky’s typically skimpy outfits.
“She’s on a journey,” I replied, and the first act began.
Sotce, a baby-voiced internet poet, known for her distinct style fusing aspects of girlhood with spiritual enlightenment, kicked the night off by reading entries from her diaries aloud. “I touched leaves to calm down,” she cooed, dragging the simple line out so slowly it felt like my brain was being tenderized. I googled her age. Also 26. Butler says femininity is a performance, but she didn’t say I had to like it.
Not all the readings were so syrupy; August Lamm, the anti-tech advocate and writer, read a poignant short story about dating a married man. The novelist Avigayl Sharp captivated the audience with a hilarious portion of her new book Offseason, about meeting a right-wing guy and talking to him about inner beauty. Vicky periodically popped her head out from backstage, as if to gauge what would be expected of her. Calloway came after with a drawn out stretch of characteristically indulgent throat-clearing, introducing herself and her credentials for ten minutes before reading four original translations of Greek poems and then decamping to another reading at Bathhouse down the street.
Poet Alex Dimitrov – an acerbic fellow, apparently banned from multiple Dimes Square establishments – bristled in the follow-up, puncturing the evening by accusing Calloway of enjoying the performance of being a writer more than being a writer. The crowd gasped.
And then the star act.
Endearingly shy, Vicky tiptoed out to meet the audience. She asked her companion Harry Daniels (another Jackson client, who is TikTok famous for confronting celebrities and singing to them on camera) to warm up the crowd for her, fumbling with the mic before launching into a series of poems stitched together from her tweets and iPhone notes.
“There almost wasn’t a Vicky to say woah to” she began, somberly.
She admonished “lustful men” and read about her desire for love and a family. Elfin women with tiny tattoos and men with unnaturally blond hair shouted “Period” and snapped their fingers to Vicky’s wisdom. She waxed political. “My poem on Kamala Harris,” announced Vicky. “Kamala is a witch.” The crowd screamed.
Vicky’s tweets – mostly Biblically-inflected one liners evoking the most human parts of the books of Ecclesiastes or the Psalms – were heavily featured in her reading. Two of her poems fashioned themselves after the Bible literally. Vicky announced:
“Proverb: If you don’t have a plan, Miami gonna make a plan for you.”
“Psalm: Make no mistake this is spiritual warfare. All of it.”
Her poetry got more explicitly Christ-conscious as the night wore on. “The wages of sin is death,” she quoted from Romans 6, before addressing the audience: “Finish the verse.” For all the talk of a religious revival in New York, the room certainly didn’t evidence it. They looked around at each other, baffled. Vicky relieved the tension: “Say Amen!”
At the end, Vicky asked everyone to stand up so she could pray for them, asking God to help the crowd become the men and women they were meant to be. Even the most irony-soaked dandies bowed their heads. “In Jesus’s name, Amen.”
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