'Everything is at once specific and imaginary in Michael Aiken’s poetry. Its minute particulars serve to make strange the very local landscapes where a natural world interpenetrates a world of human constructs.' — Laurie Duggan

'Pathos meets humour in Michael Aiken’s eco-urban world of devastating settler contingencies, commuter ennui, and weedy exuberance. Enjoyable and witty, spare and songful, these poems are unsentimentally attentive to the other than humans that share our suburbs. The Little Book of Sunlight and Maggots is both open-eyed and uncannily hopeful in its engagements with the tragic overlay of concrete on Country.' — Anne Elvey