Everyone has that one friend — or perhaps you are that friend — who shits on poetry every chance they get, using the real world happenstance of so much bad poetry to tell a fundamental untruth about the real potential of great poetry. What it can do for you, what it can do to the ether itself. Well, fuck that guy. Chances are, he’s never been to a Bedfellows reading, where the city’s youngish, organically grown, woke-as-fuck poetry scene plugs the craft in and gets the whole goddamned room vibrating.

This summer-themed reading for Bedfellows — a journal, by the way, which focuses on sex and intimacy in ways that are consistently fresh and not at all redolent of sex corn like HBO’s Real Sex — is bound to be a good one, in topicality and talent alike. The roster is basically a who’s-who of the scene right now, and a hotter primer, you will not find.