Mutations
by Gary J. Shipley & Devin Horan
"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.
Text by Gary J. Shipley
Images by Devin Horan
With an introduction by Steve Finbow
out now
Collector's Edition
Each Collector's Edition includes the book and
A4 mounted collage made by Devin Horan // £50
About the authors
Gary J. Shipley is the author of twelve books, most recently Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard (Anthem), 30 Fake Beheadings (Spork) and Warewolff! (Hexus). He has been published in numerous literary magazines, anthologies and academic journals. More information can be found at Thek Prosthetics.
Devin Horan made the films Boundary (2009), Late and Deep (2011), Grodek (2014), Akra (2017), and The Animals Are Sick With Love (2020) and was the editor of Pages of Natural History (Pagine di storia naturale, 2019). His collages are an ongoing project begun in 2013 entitled Insomnia of Worlds, which will consist of 1000 pieces. https://jesuve.tumblr.com/
Steve Finbow’s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London, 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press, 2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012) and Down Among the Dead (Fahrenheit 13, 2014). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series was published in 2011. His other works include Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater Books, 2017) And Death Mort Tod - A European Book of the Dead (Infinity Land Press 2019). The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine Sulphate in 2019. He lives in Langres, France.