The Medusa Glance is a present-day triptych, a rich and profoundly nuanced contemporary narrative, sensitive to all the immanent and minute shades of reality, aspiring to embrace and incorporate the whole spectrum of lived experience. This lively, alert, highly critical, cynical, daring and often intrepid portrait of our age, this unyielding reckoning, offers us a large-scale panorama filtered through the subjectivity of the poet which is the strategy of Manolis to embrace, appropriate and refigure reality. The vividness of his imagery and the richness of the moments of lived experience and enacted narratives make our journey into the inextricable intertwining of his inner world not only memorable but pleasurable as well. The poetry of Manolis confirms the postulation not only of the primacy of being, but of being as action and involvement. His poetic world is continually in the process of taking shape and being formed. This ceaseless becoming is the very essence of his intellectual and artistic universe. When it comes to these texts, to engage in hermeneutics is to engage in a reflection of openness and dialogue. The fragmented narrative serves the enlargement of the horizon of our experiences by an immersion in the inexhaustibly divergent possibilities of alternative subjectivity. The poetry of Manolis is a valid, cogent and timely exhortation, a perennial admonition endeavoring to disclose the hidden and mysterious dynamics of consciousness and the underlying metaphorical architecture of our lives in a new hermeneutical framework of poetic truth.

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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