Leviathan

by Neil Aitken

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published March 1, 2016

About the author

Neil Aitken is the author of two full-length books of poetry: The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga 2008), winner of the Philip Levine Prize and Babbage's Dream (Sundress Publications, 2017), a semi-finalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poetry chapbook, Leviathan was published in 2016 by Hyacinth Girl Press and recently received an Elgin Award from the SFPA. He is also the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and administrator of book tour resource Have Book Will Travel (www.havebookwilltravel.com). His poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Poetry Southeast, RHINO, Sou'wester, and Washington Square, and several anthologies. He is a Kundiman fellow and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. In collaboration with Chinese poet-translator Ming Di, he translated The Book of Cranes by Zang Di and later, Ming Di's own first selected poems, River Merchant's Wife (Marick Press 2012). Most recently, he co-translated the work of seven poets for New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012, (Tupelo 2013). He received the inaugural DJS Translation Prize for his translation work.

More information can be found on his website: www.neil-aitken.com "

Reviews

[DivaDiane SM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not really sure how I feel about this collection. I don’t really see it as genre poetry, but it does get a little other worldly especially towards the end. I didn’t know anything about Babbage or Ada Lovelace before this book. The language is beautiful, full of longing and desire. I wish there’d been more variety of poetic form, though. All but one poem in free verse couplets.

[Mary Soon Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This chapbook centers on Charles Babbage, one of the founding fathers of computers. It deals with his visionary work, as well as with the weight of loss in his personal life. I very much like the topic and the background sense of the Industrial Revolution. Babbage's story is told in eighteen poems, none more than a page long, all but one presented in two-line stanzas. I liked the poems, yet, with the exception of the two about Ada Lovelace, I did not love them. Line by line, I came close to loving them, but the whole often felt less than the sum of its parts.

Despite its Elgin nomination as one of the best speculative poetry books of 2016, it contains very little that is fantastical. Nonetheless, I think the subject matter is likely to appeal to many science fiction readers, just as it appealed to me.

[Genevieve]

"This year, you shine the light again, point it above the invisible barrier / that divides the living from the dead, and let your grief burn // in all its stuttering failure"

-from "Babbage Sending Messages to Ada, Now Gone. 1852 (p.15)

[John Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - characters come onstage too briefly; deftly handled historical material