Leo Yankevich



Leo Yankevich (born October 30, 1961) is an American poet and the editor of The New Formalist.

Life
Born into a Roman Catholic family of Irish and Polish descent, he grew up and attended high school in Farrell, Pennsylvania, a small steel town in western Pennsylvania. He then studied History and Polish Studies at Alliance College, Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, receiving a BA in 1984. Later that year he travelled to Poland on a fellowship from the Kosciuszko Foundation to attend Kraków's Jagiellonian University. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he decided to settle permanently in Poland. Since that time he has lived in Gliwice, an industrial city in Upper Silesia. Yankevich is married and has three sons.

Writing
Yankevich writes poems in both traditional metre and in syllabics, and only occasionally in free verse. He is a prolific translator, having rendered into English poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stanisław Grochowiak, Czesław Miłosz, Alexander Blok, Leopold Staff, Nikolay Gumilev, Boleslaw Lesmian, and many others. He has a large Internet presence with work published in scores of online publications, ranging from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to Poets Against War.

Quotes

 * "Nothing remains after philosophy but physical reality, be it dew on a lovely girl's maidenhood, or twisted wreckage after a tank battle."

Chapbooks

 * The Language of Birds; Pygmy Forest Press, 1994 ISBN 0-944550-39-8
 * Grief's Herbs (translations after the Polish of Stanisław Grochowiak); The Mandrake Press, 1995
 * The Gnosis of Gnomes; The Mandrake Press, 1995
 * Epistle from The Dark; The Mandrake Press, 1996 ISBN 83-904541-1-4
 * The Golem of Gleiwitz; The Mandrake Press, 1998 ISBN 83-904541-6-5
 * "Metaphysics" by Leo Yankevich, 2002

Books

 * The Unfinished Crusade; The Mandrake Press, 2000 ISBN 83-904541-9-X
 * The Last Silesian; The Mandrake Press, 2005 ISBN 0-9708219-2-1
 * Tikkun Olam; Counter-Currents Publishing, 2012 ISBN 978-1-935965-38-1