Neil Aitken

About

Neil Aitken is the author of two full-length poetry collections Babbage’s Dream (2017) and The Lost Country of Sight (2008), winner of the Philip Levine Prize, as well as a poetry chapbook, Leviathan (2016), which won the Elgin Prize for Sci Fi Poetry. With fellow poet-translator Ming Di, he co-translated The Book of Cranes: Selected Poems of Zang Di (2015) and has worked on translations of poems from many other contemporary Chinese poets. His poetry has appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Literary Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, Lantern Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Poetry Review, and many other literary journals and anthologies. As a librettist, he collaborated with composer Juhi Bansal to write Star Singer, a full-length contemporary opera produced by Beth Morrison Productions and slated for a 2028 debut at Prototype Festival in NYC.

Neil holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing (USC), an MFA in Creative Writing (UC Riverside), an MLIS (UBC), and a BS in Computer Science (BYU). He has served as Writer-in-Residence for the Regina Public Library (2021-2022) and the Virtual Writer-in-Residence for the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild (2020).

He currently is employed as a Data Librarian at University of Toronto's Map & Data Library and continues to teach and mentor creative writers in his spare time.

Books

Babbage's Dream (2017). Poetry.

Babbage's Dream (Sundress Publications, 2017)
Semi-finalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize
Taking its title from Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century mathematician, who designed but did not complete what would have been the first mechanical programmable computer, Babbage's Dream weaves together not only Victorian and contemporary anxieties about the spectacle and threat of new technology, but also offers us lyric redefinitions of computer programming terms and first-person perspectives of literary and historical artificially intelligent others.
In stunningly elegant couplets, Neil Aitken transposes the dreams of machines and humans into musical, sonically deft lyrics that sing songs of creation, vision, possibility, futurity. These beautifully crafted poems—evoking the designs of nineteenth-century mathematician Charles Babbage, who conceptualized the first mechanical programmable computer—explore the tautologies between mathematics and song, science and lyric, the rational and the passionate, dystopia and hope. In the infinite tape loop of memory and imagination, Babbage’s Dream posits a Turing Test in which the reader circles both anxiously and gloriously through aspects of making, maker, and the made.

—Lee Ann Roripaugh

In Neil Aitken’s exquisite poems, Charles Babbage, inventor and thinker comes to life in an array of stunning images. The poems spark and leap in exhilarating assemblages as we piece together the narrative behind the concept of the programmable computer but further beyond, Aitken invites us to ask questions about consciousness, thought, and who we are in our daily lives. The jolt of the past comes back as “the bit of code we’ve let loose in the dark” and the fractals return as a heart in mourning. This is a transfixing book on memory, the human mind, and the possibility of rebirth in unexpected but musical planes.

—Oliver de la Paz

Through Aitken’s long lyrical lines and guided by narrative threads, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of the polymath Charles Babbage, his 19th century world and his language: the language of science and engineering, a language that at once halts and captivates. Come inside the Aitken's Babbage's Dream for new perceptions of the world.

—Kimiko Hahn

The Lost Country of Sight (2008). Poetry.

The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga Press, 2008)
2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Revolving around the themes of exile and return, memory and forgetting, and the reconstruction of home through the written word, The Lost Country of Sight navigates a path through loss and separation that spans Canada, the United States, and Taiwan; the death of a father; and a life lived in the liminal space between cultures and languages.
It’s difficult to believe that Neil Aitken's The Lost Country of Sight is a first book, since there is mastery throughout the collection. His ear is finely tuned, and his capacity for lyricism seems almost boundless. What stands out everywhere in the poems is his imagery, which is not only visually precise but is also possessed of a pure depth. The poems never veer off into the sensational; they are built from pensiveness and quietude and an affection for the world. “Traveling Through the Prairies, I Think of My Father's Voice” strikes me as a perfectly made poem, but poems of similar grace and power are to be found throughout the book. This is a debut to celebrate.

—C.G. Hanzlicek, 2007 Philip Levine Prize Judge

The voice in these poems is that of a sighted, awake heart discovering its home in language and its homelessness in the world. Steeped in longing, the imagination here is concrete, vivid, sensuous, and ultimately erotic, even as it perceives that meaning and beauty are evanescent.

—Li-Young Lee

Fueled by motion and emotion, Neil Aitken's The Lost Country of Sight is literally and figuratively a moving collection. His winding roads and “ghost cars” move us over the landscapes of identity and personal history with stirring meditative grace. “There is a song at the beginning of every journey” Aitken tells us in one poem even as he says in another, “these are journeys we never take.” This poet is our both our wise, wide-eyed tour guide and our dazed, day-dreaming companion in The Lost Country of Sight. This is a rich, mature debut.

—Terrance Hayes