Michael Aiken - The Little Book of Sunlight & Maggots - Book Launch

Join us for the launch of local, and critically acclaimed, poet Michael Aiken's new collection, The Little Book of Sunlight & Maggots. To be launched by Luke Fischer.

About the Book

The Little Book of Sunlight & Maggots is the third book of poetry from critically acclaimed Sydney writer Michael Aiken. Following on from his 2018 verse novel Satan Repentant, this latest book is a collection of new and collected shorter poems about the world around us.

Praise

"Pathos meets humour in Michael Aiken's eco-urban world of devasting 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, Managing Editor Plumwood Mountain, an Australian journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

About the Author

Michael Aiken is a critically acclaimed writer and singer living in Newtown. His first book, A Vicious Example: Sydney 1934 1392k1 - 1811 1682k2 (Grand Parade, 2014) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Dame Mary Gilmore Prize and an Australian Book Design award. His verse novel Satan Repentant (UWA, 2018), described by David Malouf as "a tour de force", was awarded the Australian Book Review's inaugural Laureate's Fellowship.

Michael's work is characterised by exploration of and experimentation with perception, self-identity and knowledge, and the ways in which these factors modify our understanding of the world in which we live.