MDNTMRKTVOX Reading: ERR WOES

by Vivian Storenbend Potts

This episode features a reading from the introduction and three poems from ERR WOES, the bruised, brilliant, and body-forward collection by Vivian Storenbend Potts. The cover alone looks like a nervous system trying to remember desire on a mustard-colored mattress, so naturally the poems follow suit.

Tonight’s reading moves through erotic command, Black girl memory, and thick-bodied blessing without asking permission from politeness, taste, or the usual paper-thin literary decorum.

Featured in this reading

Introduction

“mastery of the orgasm”

“to Darkskinned for childhood”

“blessed with An ass”

About the reading

The introduction opens the emotional and aesthetic logic of ERR WOES: pleasure as knowledge, memory as scar tissue, and the body as both archive and argument. From there, the selected poems widen the field.

“mastery of the orgasm” treats pleasure not as spectacle, but as study, discipline, ritual, and survival. It is a poem concerned with agency, with timing, with the body’s refusal to be reduced to somebody else’s grammar.

“to Darkskinned for childhood” turns toward memory, color, protection, naming, and the wounds carried out of youth. It reads like an address, an invocation, and a reckoning all at once, holding tenderness close to injury without sanding down either.

“blessed with An ass” shifts the register into praise, wit, embodiment, and hard-earned self-possession. The poem understands the politics of being looked at, desired, judged, mythologized, and still somehow remaining gloriously one’s own.

Themes

Black embodiment and erotic intelligence

Childhood memory and inherited feeling

Shame, praise, humor, and fleshly presence

The body as text, weapon, inheritance, and song

Desire as both performance and private literacy

Why this episode matters

This reading offers a compact entry into the larger world of ERR WOES: a collection that refuses neat categories and instead works the seam between sensuality, social inscription, and personal myth. Potts writes with heat, ache, bite, and a kind of unembarrassed precision that many poets duck because civilization runs on cowardice.

Tone and style

Expect:

sensual language with intellectual weight

confessional force without sentimentality

playful audacity beside emotional exposure

performance energy rooted in slam, page, and lived texture

Featured author

Vivian Storenbend Potts writes in a mode where body, memory, and voice collide. The poems in ERR WOES carry the urgency of performance while remaining attentive to image, fracture, and line. This is poetry that knows being seen can be dangerous, comic, holy, and exhausting at the same time.

Tagline

A reading of hunger, memory, shade, skin, and self-invention from ERR WOES by Vivian Storenbend Potts.

Hashtags

#VivianStorenbendPotts #ERRWOES #PoetryReading #SpokenWord #BlackPoetry #EroticPoetry #SlamPoetry #MDNTMRKTVOX #MidnightMarket #PoetryPodcast #LiteraryPerformance #BodyPoetics

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