Humans
- Anton Yakovlev (author)
- Emma Steinkraus (artist)
Page count
52Keywords
Poetry, Place, Setting, Character, Characters, Relationships, AllegoryPublication date
2015Language(s)
EnglishPublication media type
Print DocumentChapbook
Publication series
Unlimited EditionsNeptune Court
“If one of the delights of poetry is the way it provides the reader access to a mind as different from his own as the landscape of another planet, then Neptune Court is an invitation not to be missed. The situations Anton Yakovlev responds to in these poems are the universal ones that face us all on the border between solitude and the risks of engagement: love overvalued and undervalued, lost, mourned, reimagined, counted on too heavily, longed for, mythologized, consciously transformed into the stuff of art, examined in the mirror of another’s experience. What is different — indeed, unique — is the phantasmagorical imagery deployed to tell the stories — surreal, peopled with unexpected characters and humanized abstractions — against bizarre backgrounds where biographical events unfold like tiny dramas, almost accidentally but with surprising emotional force.” — Rhina P. Espaillat
“If art is the lie you tell to tell the truth, the poems in Neptune Court are precision-made howlers that bring you nose to nose with yourself.” — Jim Klein
“Anton Yakovlev’s world is strange and beautiful, vaguely resembling Bergen County. Inside it, a zebra rides a motor boat on East River; there are ghosts and ghost writers, lovers drifting apart, the doomed and the graceless, and the always-grinning Almighty. You, the reader, will be mesmerized. You’ll have to surrender all caution and enter his poems with ‘your sneakers soaked, / your camera steady, / your heart awake.'” — Claudia Serea
Most of these poems occur in everyday places: the two parallel Service Roads at the Boston Airport; Moscow; the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire; the La Brea Tar Pits; La Dent de Ruth; Manhattan; Jim Thorpe; the Venice of New Jersey. Seen through the refractive lenses of memory, or imagined versions of actual events that have occurred there, these locations turn allegorical. Many poems center on characters who hope in their own way to avoid the place’s resident Exterminating Angel. In the background, rapid rivers drown out unacknowledged symphonies. — Anton Yakovlev
About the Contributor(s)
Originally from Moscow, Russia, Anton Yakovlev lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey and works as a college textbook editor. He studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University. His work is published or forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Raintown Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Angle, Cardinal Points Literary Journal, The New Verse News, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, CityLitRag and elsewhere. He has also directed several short films.
Emma Steinkraus is a visual artist living in Iowa City. Her current obsessions include imagined apocalypses, witches and mushrooming; her recurrent obsession is with depictions of romantic love. Before moving to Iowa as an Iowa Arts Fellow in the Painting program, she studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at Williams College. She has received a Hubbard Hutchinson Fellowship, a Frederick M. Peyser Prize, worked as a Steamboat Scholar in Contemporary Curation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and completed residencies at the Henry Luce III Center for Arts and Religion and at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.
