"Gary J Shipley’s writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy, and never more convincingly than in Mutations."

- Dennis Cooper

 

 

Mutations is a rewriting of the Real, a reimagining of the Imaginary, a shocking virus of words that transfigures our perceptions of good and evil, a contagion of collages that fixes our gaze even when all we want to do is look away. 
- Steve Finbow

These letters and images create, by their forms and the mutations of these forms originating in the body, a fluctuating picture that must correspond objectively to a transcendental collagic representation of the final and highest realities. Whoever says “loss of identity” also says Mutations, metamorphosis, transvaluation, poetic creation. Between the two there is a distance, a dangerous journey. What is the risk? Bewilderment, madness, suicide. Mutations is not striving for another being, but for another mode of being. It is more than anything something which transforms the body. It is the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the body of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating collages through which the texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition. 

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Text by Gary J. Shipley 

Images by Devin Horan

With an introduction by Steve Finbow

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