Neil Aitken: Poetry & Art

Neil Tangaroa Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight which won the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in Fall 2008. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, Poetry Southeast, Sou'wester, and elsewhere.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Neil grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the western parts of the United States and Canada. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California - Riverside, and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Author photo: Dawnae Wilson

In a former career, Neil was a computer programmer for Vivendi Universal Games, a multi-national games publisher. Although he no longer writes game code for companies, his love of programming and technology has recently manifested itself in his current poetry manuscript project, Babbage's Dream, which explores the themes of exile, beauty, and isolation within the world of computers and computer programmers. Poems from this manuscript have already been finding homes in fine literary journals.

When not writing poetry or designing websites, Neil serves as the editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, an online literary journal focused on publishing poetry and showcasing reviews and interviews pertaining to first books of poetry. You can visit it here

His poems are doubled-forests, like Magritte or early Taoist landscape paintings; you journey outside in one direction admiring the foliage, the arrangements of shadow and landscape, then suddenly, you fall inside into voracious vortices of light, fire, voice, and wisdom – the kind that shimmer behind the words. His breadth is vast and his depth is a tremulous chakra opening, burning quietly, even deliciously in your heart. A rare and perhaps the most gifted new writer on the loose.

—Juan-Felipe Herrera, Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair, UC Riverside

Neil Aitken is a true visionary poet. His instincts for the craft of poetry, its assemblage as verbal object, its locations in time and context, are startling. He is the kind of writer who makes readers want to read and poets remember why they write. He makes poetry feel young, as though the last three thousand years have passed as a single decade and there are still libraries of wonder to be written. Mr. Aitken is filling their shelves as we watch with our hands to our mouths, our cups of tea forgotten.

—Brendan Constantine, Poet-in-Residence, Windward School