Attention, Please: A Night Out With the Poet Laureate of Dimes Square

Woah VickyJustin Wolf

On second thought, maybe the death of Dimes Square wasn’t exaggerated after all. It’s true that Manhattan’s trendiest micro-neighborhood has lost some cachet; these days, fewer rising stars are flocking to the intersection where the Lower East Side meets Chinatown to vape outside Clandestino and drink martinis at Le Dive. Just last week, Kiki’s—a Greek spot known for its platters and $25 jugs of wine—was seized by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which says the restaurant’s LLC and one of its owners owe more than $1 million in taxes. You could almost see the epigraph being written: Here lies Dimes Square, 2020–2025-ish.

But you’d never know any of that from the scene at Le Père this past Saturday night. Dozens of Eckhaus Latta–clad, Tabi-toed aspiring downtown cool kids were lined up around the block to attend a poetry reading at the menswear store, headlined by writer Victoria Rose. The name might not ring a bell—but if you’re familiar with her at all, you’re more likely to recognize her as controversial internet sensation Woah Vicky.

Justin Wolf

Woah Vicky gained national attention in the 2010s for her outlandish, ridiculous, often offensive online behavior—like claiming that she has Black ancestry (her arrest record stated that she was white), casually using the N-word, and releasing a mostly unintelligible rap song called—wait for it—“Woah Vicky.” She publicly feuded and physically fought another problematic white rapper, Bhad Bhabie (a.k.a the “catch me outside” girl). By 2023, she had rebranded as a Christian and accused Lil Nas X of faking being gay so that he could “get more famous.” (Lil Nas X dismissed her allegation.) She’s parlayed all that drama into 3.5 million Instagram followers, 9.3 million TikTok followers, and more than a million subscribers on YouTube.

The platform where Woah Vicky really shines is X, where her hyper-confessional, typo-laden posts repeatedly fascinate a certain subset of the internet. Sometimes the posts gain national attention—like in 2024, when she tweeted that she had been kidnapped and later said it was a joke because she was “bored.” Her recent popular tweets include “you don’t need a collage degree when you got Jesus”; “Can I have some money”; and “I’ve never met a person who wears colored contacts that is mentally sound.”

It makes sense that the anti-woke Dimes Square set—with its flair for the controversial and edgy—would be drawn to see Woah Vicky read her work out loud. By 7:15 p.m., Le Père was filling with names known to the downtown set, including I Love LA’s True Whitaker and Caroline Calloway, wearing a red and purple flower crown and trying to find the best place to set out copies of her book, Scammer. Michael Jackson blared from the speakers—an eye-roll-inducing “fuck you” to the concept of cancel culture—as guests sat on black folding chairs or jockeyed for standing-room-only space in the back.

Caroline CallowayJustin Wolf

Woah Vicky arrived at 7:45, arm in arm with Harry Daniels—a Gen Z influencer best known for singing terrible versions of pop stars’ own songs at them, seemingly against their will. Daniels trotted Woah Vicky through the crowd like a show pony as attendees cheered and took photos, before she awkwardly landed on a makeshift stage with yellow walls that looked straight out of Backrooms. Then she and Daniels slipped away to hide in a back stairwell. “Where is her publicist?” asked a kind gay seated beside me, witnessing the dysfunction of Vicky’s entrance. As it turns out, said publicist—Mitchell Jackson, naturally—was right behind us. I soon learned that Woah Vicky joined Jackson’s roster after Daniels brought her to a livestream at looksmaxxer Clavicular’s house.

“I just think she’s a voice of purity, and such a pure voice in a world that loves irony,” said an attendee named Jordan, a film publicist, when asked why he’s a fan of Woah Vicky. Between belly laughs, his friend, an artist named Aidan, agreed: “She’s a vessel.”

Around 7:50, the reading began. The evening’s host, Alex Hartman—the mind behind the satirical downtown-skewering Instagram account Nolita Dirtbag—was sure to mention both the seizure of Kiki’s and the Strait of Hormuz before the festivities got underway. Some writers, like novelists Avigayl Sharp and August Lamm, shared actual excerpts of their work. Others, like the first reader of the evening—the manic-pixie-dream-girl-esquel Sotce—went a different route. Sotce asked the audience to vote on whether they’d rather hear her Substack, her diary, or scripture. The diary beat out scripture by a hair, although scripture might have been more interesting.

SotcheJustin Wolf

At least Sotce seemed to come prepared. Calloway, who’s infamous for her lack of preparation, was up to her old tricks when she took the stage—vamping for about 10 minutes, refusing to offer what she called some “half-baked shit.” Maybe she was rattled by Woah Vicky and Harry Daniels, who reemerged to get a selfie with Calloway before she began. As she spoke, Calloway channeled Andy Kaufman—claiming, repeatedly, that she “had to go” and that her time would “go by really quick” before spending an uncomfortable and seemingly endless number of minutes hyping up her actual performance: her translation of six poems by first century BCE writer Sulpicia.

“At last, the love I’ve waited for has come,” she read. “A love that would make me more ashamed if I hadn’t hid it from my friends with a veil. And if naked, I had just let the rumors fly. Until now, every poem of mine has been a prayer.”

Caroline Calloway and Woah VickyJustin Wolf

Authentic or not, the translations were nothing special. But Calloway’s performance—her manic and sunny disposition, her inability to read the room, her insistence on over-enunciating the T’s in words like Latin and written—was something to behold. If Calloway’s TikTok page is to be believed, she seems to be having a tough time; she recently claimed to be effectively homeless after a bad breakup, though she’s since said she’s found a sublet. (Don’t worry: She’s posting through it.)

Calloway’s act didn’t play well online—one Redditor left a comment on a video from the event reading, “I love when she embarrasses herself in public”—or in the room, for that matter. Alex Dimitrov—an actual poet and Columbia professor who read a personal, funny, bleak poem about his exile from Dimes Square—hit the nail on the head with his slightly caustic opening remarks: “I think Caroline Calloway is more interested in the performance of being a writer then being a writer,” he said, receiving some “oohs” from the audience. He quickly backtracked: “I’m kidding. I like her. I like camp!”

Justin Wolf

And then there was Woah. Going into the event, many wondered whether Woah Vicky was really writing her own tweets—which often seem too perfectly engineered to be genuine. (I tweeted as much, inadvertently getting Mitchell Jackson’s attention and an invite to the event.) “Maybe she has help,” said Josh. “But I believe women can do anything.”

As she stepped into the Backrooms, a visibly nervous Woah Vicky opened with a prayer—or some semblance of a prayer. “Separate the Woah from the Vicky,” she began. “I’m tired of hanging out with people that are singing for Woah Vicky. Woah Vicky’s not real. Look at me, for my name is Victoria. For my name is Victoria, and I’m a child of God. Amen.”

Maybe it’s fitting that Woah Vicky’s own reading felt more like a church revival than a poetry reading, with repeated calls to God and Jesus and a rapturous response from her own followers. Although she was too nervous to look at the audience and spent her time onstage shifting from foot to foot in her black sparkly halter romper, the magic of Woah Vicky—the irreverence and blunt honesty—was still there. Her shyness was offset by her distinct way of speaking, which she was accused of faking during her “blackfishing” era: a deeply Southern accent, perhaps a source of inspiration for Riley Keough in Zola, that immediately set her apart from the New York vocal fries that surround her.

Here’s a typical poem, one of several she read: “Michael Jackson would have slid in my DMs. I can resonate with Michael Jackson. He likes to be around kids, not in the pedophile way. I know they genuine. Same with autism. That’s why I love autistic kids. Yes, just love. That’s why God says something very good about the kids.”

Woah Vicky at Le Pere, New York, June 2026Justin Wolf

Her hyper-confessional nature—her willingness to express literally any random thought that came to her head—hasn’t changed. Onstage, she shared that she’ll sometimes send the same text to 20 people, then tweet out the same thoughts (relatable). She said that she’d enjoyed spur-of-the-moment vacations to Tanzania and Nigeria (less relatable). “In Africa, the number of cows you have is a measure of your richness,” she read. “I asked the girl, ‘What’s your bride price?’ She said 300 cows. Well, if yours is 300, mine is a thousand.” The crowd went wild.

“No one could write that shit but Woah Vicky,” Jackson told me after the show. The film publicist, Jordan, walked away surprised by what he had seen: “It wasn’t as mean-spirited [as I expected]. It was grounded.” And with that, she walked out into Dimes Square—a haven for those who might not deserve our attention, but certainly seem to want it anyway.

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