In his latest book of poems, Manolis celebrates the “imperfect perfection of the imperfect chaos,” energetic and lucid philosophic meditations on the mysteries of being human. "Übermensch" is derived from one of Nietzsche’s most challenging and frequently misunderstood concepts, the Superman or Overman. Nietzsche believed that we are capable of being better than we are, possessing more understanding, more compassion, greater wisdom and more awareness which allows humanism to fill the void left by the absence of God. As Virgil led Dante on his midlife journey, the Übermensch is our guide through modernity. Manolis has extended his range, celebrating the magnetic possibilities of the self in a narrative that takes us on an intellectual and spiritual journey. The poems possess a vitality of sensuous music in a sea of thought, kinetic and direct, imbued by rational compassion and mystic clarity, in poems that transcend the quotidian to enrapture us by the enigma of an unchained life. The voice in the poems awakens us to the next stage of consciousness and moves through impenetrable breath like a river that flows through the spiritual body, mouth to mouth, reviving language from the still bones of silence. Übermensch is a reverie in the best traditions of poetry, a poetic sacrement from which the taste of language rises like honey oozing in the ear. With Nietzche’s Zarathustra as an inspiration, every word a music more music than music and after the silence breaks, the voice goes on forever. In Übermensch, with the Greek en face, the taste and texture of the language transforms the empyreal whose accents linger long in the vocabulary of the imagination.

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek island of Crete in 1947. At a young age his family moved first to Thessaloniki and then to Athens where he was educated, achieving a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences at the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked in several different jobs over the years. He attended Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree program. He has written three novels and a large number of collections of poetry, which are slowly appearing as published works. Various articles, poems and short stories in Greek as well as in English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Australia and Greece. After working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver and stock broker, he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening and traveling. In 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company in Surrey, BC with the goal of publishing literary books.

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