The inmates at Rikers Island were slumped in plastic chairs, their expressions suggesting boredom and doubt. They had been pried from their favorite television shows to attend — of all things — a poetry reading. Some nice people from the public library, they were told.

Then came the poet: unshaven, in his early 20s, dark hooded sweatshirt, dark T-shirt, dark ball cap slung backward on his head. Some men leaned forward, elbows on their knees. Expressions shifted to curiosity: This was not what they were expecting.

“I’m going to kick a couple of poems,” the poet, Miles Hodges, said in a drawl of the street, before unleashing a blizzard of words titled “Harlem.” His intonation percussive and incantatory, he spoke of race and of children playing amid “roached blunts and roached joints” that were “scattered around the purple-, pink- and black-chalked R.I.P. signs as if whispering from the concrete jungle, ‘I’m resting in peace and high.’ ”

Mr. Hodges, 25, is a spoken-word performer and a somewhat unusual ambassador of the New York Public Library, where he was hired this year to help create programs to attract members of the millennial generation.