[Cwgrad-announcements] Neil Aitken Features!

[cwgrad-announcements at lists.ucr.edu]

Neil Aitken is the featured poet at the Neighborhood
Cup on Tuesday, December 6 at 7:30 pm.  Hope to see
you there!

Neil Aitken is originally from western Canada, but has
lived all over the world – from small farm towns in
northern Saskatchewan to the industrial districts of
Taipei City. Over the course of his 31 years, he has
been a farm laborer, an artist, a missionary, a math
tutor, a computer games programmer, and now a graduate
student in the MFA Creative Writing at the University
of California, Riverside. He presently serves as
co-editor of CRATE, a new literary journal located in
Riverside and his own work has appeared or is
forthcoming in a number of journals including DIAGRAM,
Washington Square, Prairie Poetry, and Poetic
Diversity.  Neil writes about longing and loss of
home, wherever it might be.

One of Neil's poems:

Forgetting to Fill Up in Saskatoon

We ran on empty for an hour,
three boys in a borrowed car,
miles away from anywhere
but these dead farm towns
without street lamps or oil.
Just burnt out gas stations
and the low moans of cattle
shifting in the dark.
Dry as December, we coasted
all the way home, whispering prayers
and holding our breath as if to lighten
the load till the faint lines of the city
rose at the edge of our view,
like the far off fires of a familiar shore,
and we pulled ourselves in
as weary men, tired of the sea.

Time/Location:
Tuesday, Dec 6   7:30 pm
The Neighborhood Cup
1 Journey,
Aliso Viejo, CA