Tag: Anton Yakovlev

Upcoming Reading: Sunday, 10/27 — 7pm Eastern

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Sunday, October 27 — 7pm (Eastern)
Featured Poets: Ace Boggess, CL Bledsoe, Anton Yakovlev, Jason Gordy Walker
Tickets available here (Free or Donation)

~ About The Featured Poets ~ 

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and The Saviors. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Anton Yakovlev’s poetry collection One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean was published in 2024 by Redacted Books, an imprint of ELJ Editions. His chapbook Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Poetry Prize. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, came out from Sensitive Skin Books in 2019. Yakovlev is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks: The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015). Originally from Moscow, Russia, Anton is a graduate of Harvard University and a former education director at Bowery Poetry Club. More info here.

Jason Gordy Walker’s poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Confrontation, Measure, ONE ART, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, among other places. His reviews and interviews can be found in Birmingham Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and the blogs of Dos Madres Press and NewPages. He has received scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Poetry by the Sea, and other institutions, and he earned his MFA from the University of Florida and his MA from the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Currently, he lives in Alabama and practices translating Norwegian poetry.

Three Poems by Anton Yakovlev

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

ALARM WILL SOUND

Our childhoods crack their fish heads through the ice
of our routine-embellished brains—
good cats show up on windowpanes,
magical moose surprise us with advice
on days of blight or eaten love
when scimitars we thought we’d left behind
glisten around us until we’re blind
and faith is a rotten baseball glove.

Our childhoods hold our hands when we’re adrift
in romance fjords, sewn into hair-shirt gloom,
when failures tenderize our living room.
Our operating systems sift
through inner icebergs to spit out
our first grade thermos, our grandparents’ tea,
Napoleons baked before a black and white TV—
good jetties in a bay of doubt.

Our childhoods are wrapped in police tape.
The moment someone touches them, we scream
skewed words from a forgotten dream.
We sink like snowmen on a fire escape.
We turn on lovers when they get too close,
build black-hole walls around our memory
of garbage dumps we pioneered at three
in our miniature Harlequin clothes.

What else is there to do but scapegoat fear?
It’s been a lifetime since our self-esteem.
We dream in stripes, except when we don’t dream.
Hyenas frolic; children disappear.

*

LINEAGE

We handle carefully our holiday homecomings,
knowing the homes are not riot-proof.
The nap of anguish produces avalanches.
Leave well enough alone in a dusty bedroom.

But then they tell me I’ve gotten too chummy
with all the aggression we’re asleep to:
creatures comatose in a tree, the cream-cheese
feeling of being related. I’m related to fury

but we’re a dysfunctional family. Piles of Legos
loosely stacked. Later, I’ll rearrange them
worse. There are more ashes among kinfolks
than in any midtown columbarium.

Inherit the inertness. Inherit the inferno.
Inherit the drumming. Inherit the warbling sirens.
Inherit the random fire. Inherit the intervals.
Inherit the silence. Inherit the saxophones.

Inherit the love. Inherit its improbably heavy petals
then hold hands with that inheritance.
Hold hands but note the unexorcized among you
and disconnect as soon as the curtain calls.

*

INVERNESS

Before we know it, her car will screech down the hill
past cows with spots that look like music notation

on her way to a stage kiss. She tells me about
her hardest knock on the head, her corsets, her nightly

tumbles down ladders. We compare the colors
of our wheelbarrows, rummage through

our backpacks for signs of care.
Einstein said gaps between

bodies were an optical illusion.
“Through Eden took their solitary way”

assumes “in the same direction,” how else did Adam and Eve
fall asleep that night and every other

night? Far below, serial riptides hurl their foam at the cliffs
as we walk away from each other.

*

Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry chapbook is Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018), winner of the James Tate Prize. He is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Measure, Posit, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in 2019.

Two Poems by Anton Yakovlev

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

I Still Can’t Read Your Criminal Case

published by your family in hardcover.
It never made the bestseller lists, though

I hear it reads like a potboiler until
the last three pages. Forgive me

for still getting angry at the raccoons
when they snatch the chicken carcasses out

of my garbage, even on the anniversaries
of the night your body was dropped in acid.

*

Her Voice

She makes impressions without finishing touches
She fights philosophy with her homegrown Monadnock hymn
Her portable xylophones herd the pretentious beautiful
Her weapons aren’t obvious
At length the oxygen starts running out and instead of enchantment with her consciously limited
           number of breaths per minute I start to yearn for the canyon outside, the one in which you
           can still find a stray guillotine here and there
If guillotines could sing, would they sing in her voice?
If I spoke in her voice, how quickly would I catch fire?

*

Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry chapbook is Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018), winner of the James Tate Prize. He is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Measure, Posit, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in 2019.