Manchee's Revenge by Robert Cole Subject: Science Fiction / Poetry Publisher: Hilltop Press (UK) Edition Our Price inc. p&p Status first edition chapbook, A5, 24pp, ISBN 0905262409, 2008 N/A out of stock

"I whistle and you come."

Are these words from Robert Cole's startling poem sequence threat or promise?

And what unique 'I' boasts its powers and capabilities, vows its defiances, suffers its longings, across its roaring arc? One of Us? Or some Other? A brain like yours fighting for its identity against lab rat treatment, post-human cyber consciousness experiment, alien visitor opening to mankind's ruthless probing? As the voiced awareness fragments into a multilayered mix of its own identity and those of its interrogators, is this a nightmare Now of inescapably endless questioning, a revelation of secrets from a Roswell-style concealed Near Past, or Tomorrow screaming out its fractured selfhood? Who or what ever the poems channel, they challenge you to dare their disruptive impact on all your comfortable perceptions, crying forth, like that haunting traditional epitaph, "As you are now, so once was I; as I am now, so you will be."