Above the window of a San Francisco apartment hangs a rather odd-looking doll. "Malchik" has feathers and seashells instead of arms and legs and hails from Sakhalin, where U.S. videographer Brice Hobbs found its torso on the seashore. He and his girlfriend, poet and translator Rebecca Bella Wangh, later gave it limbs, and the doll became the symbol of their love affair with Russia.

Malchik's jumbled body also makes him a symbolic precursor to the couple's newest intercultural project. They have just produced a new documentary exploring the varied themes of contemporary poetry in St. Petersburg, which screened in New York last month and will be shown in St. Petersburg on June 15 and 18.

Tackling topics as broad as lost love, death, underwear, foreign aid and biblical tales, "Poets Address" depicts the city's literary bohemia, bringing together 16 poets, cultural snapshots and Western music in a quirky, colorful film. "It's celebrating all these peoples' creativity and humanity," Wangh said in an interview.

The idea was conceived in 2003, when Wangh, fresh out of college and working on translation in St. Petersburg, met Hobbs, who was filming gray whales off Sakhalin island. Both were Fulbright scholars from New England.

"I was in the middle of Okhotsk Sea looking at whales for four months," Hobbs said. "I was sort of starved for art."

Many bottles of vodka, pots of boiled potatoes, disagreements -- and four years -- later, "Poets Address" was born.

In the film, most poets read their work in the couple's candlelit apartment on Angliskaya Naberezhnaya, overlooking the Neva.

The documentary includes avant-garde pieces alongside more traditional work, and poets range from 20-somethings to Joseph Brodsky's contemporaries. Particular highlights are Alexander Kushner, an established poet with 20 published books, as well as renowned poets Dmitry Golynko-Volfson and Alexander Skidan, both of whom introduced Wangh to other poets.

Though the sing-songy Russian reciting custom has a strong presence in "Poets Address," it's juxtaposed with a few offbeat performances, such as a piece written by Olga Yegorova and Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, also known as Tsaplya and Gliuklya from the performance group Factory of Found Clothes, a major creative force in the city. The two young women in gowns are shown reciting rhymes about sperm and menstrual blood, with one arguing that sexual debauchery is the winning ticket to the hippest night clubs.

Many at the film's premiere at the Russian Bookstore #21 in Manhattan, which holds Russian-themed cultural events, found the expletives jarring, while others welcomed these "porn poets."

"It was the moment that could signal change," said Marina Temkina, a St. Petersburg-born poet and a poetry installation artist. She called the performance "fresh, authentic and radical."

"The understanding of the gender problem is very weak in Russia. I think that the male modernism [in the film] is just so old, so conservative," she said.

"They did manage to do a representative slice," countered Matvei Yankelevich, a Russian poetry guru and founding editor of an alternative publishing house in New York, Ugly Duckling Presse. He lauded the couple for including poets "that don't necessarily talk to each other or have much in common," though he said he found some accompanying video footage distracting.

The film tries to cater to a wide, multilingual audience. English subtitles, an effort of Russian and Russian-American translators, accompany each poem. The readings are spliced with original, often theatrical, video footage, such as cityscapes, the black-colored water gushing out of a faucet or a virile man in a wife-beater practicing jabs and kicks in the park.

"Living in Russia, I often felt bombarded by randomness and strangeness," Hobbs said. "That was my primary goal -- having a few things that are surprising, a few things that are funny, to allow the serious, dense, sometimes hard-to-process form of the poetry not to frustrate you."

"The project would not have succeeded so well without its humor," said Yew Leong Lee, a Singaporean writer, one of the 40 audience members at the New York screening, adding that it gave a "tangible sense of St. Petersburg."

Wangh reflected nostalgically on her 2 1/2 years in St. Petersburg. "I had succeeded in something that is very rare to do in translating myself completely into another country. People accepted me, I wasn't foreign, but at the same time I wasn't Russian."

Anna Dvibubski, a doctoral student of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, said the film captured a sense of the St. Petersburg community. "A foreigner's perspective is sometimes a way of understanding something that is inaccessible to the native."

"Poets Address" will be shown in St. Petersburg at 10 Pushkinskaya on June 15 at 18:00 and at the American Corner in the Mayakovsky Library on June 18 at 19:30.