Mark Yakich

Mark Yakich is an American poet, and professor in the Department of English at Loyola University New Orleans.^[1]

Awards

His collection of poems Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross was one of five winners of the National Poetry Series in 2003. Another collection, The Making of Collateral Beauty, won the Snowbound Chapbook Award and was published by Tupelo Press in 2006. Most recently, he published the collection The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin Poets, 2008) and the chapbook Green Zone New Orleans (Press Street, 2008).

Works

• The poem "What, Friends, Is A Life?" at Guernica
• His poem "Patriot Acts"
• The poem "Aerialist" at Verse Daily

• The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine. Penguin Books. 2008. ISBN 9780143113331. 
• Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross. Penguin Books. 2004. ISBN 9780142004517. 
• The Making of Collateral Beauty. Tupelo Press. 2006. ISBN 9781932195224. 

Reviews

Poet Mark Yakich, a creative writing professor at Loyola University, writes the very best kind of idiosyncratic, edgy poem. Seeing the world through his eyes makes the reader re-evaluate what a word can do, what a word can mean, even what history as we know it is all about.^[2]

The idiosyncrasies that permeate Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross are provocative -- of gratitude. Postmodern abstractions of the "language" variety have but nominally infiltrated this first book by Oakland poet Mark Yakich. On the whole, Yakich's language experiments are playful, and the mood spills onto the book jacket decorated with whimsical pastel figures. Think '60s and '70s album covers, from the Beatles' Claes Oldenburg-designed "Revolver" to Cream's "Disraeli Gears" and beyond. Think Dylan's fractured stream of consciousness, especially in "Tarantula." ^[3]

Twenty-eight poems make up The Making of Collateral Beauty beginning with the introductory “A Note on the Notes” where promises are made that none of this “is necessary in order to be entertained, instructed, or mauled by the apodictic poems in Mr. Yakich’s [previous] book . . . unless you are a native speaker of German.” Yakich next compares German to French in its beauty, and further makes the claim that the “most beautiful word in German is actually Austrian: Zwetschkenknödel. It means plum dumpling. Plum dumpling would be the most beautiful word in English if it were not two words.” Here is this beautiful thing. The absurdity is all there. Two plus three is six, and if you can’t see that, try again. This book is full of beautiful intonations that allow the poems to rely less on what is being said as much as how it is being said.^[4]

References

1. ^ http://www.pw.org/content/mark_yakich
2. ^ Review of The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine at the Times-Picayune
3. ^ The San Francisco Chronicle's Review of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross
4. ^ A review of The Making of Collateral Beauty at Zoland

External links

• An interview with Yakich at phillyBurbs.com
• An interview with Yakich on the blog Here Comes Everybody
• Author's website
• "Mark Yakich", Fishouse

Persondata
Name	Yakich, Mark
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death