Gut Text
Mike Corrao
PRAISE FOR GUT TEXT
“I don’t know that I have yet seen or read anything else out there that is quite like Gut Text by Mike Corrao.” — Mike Kleine, author of Lonely Men Club and Kanley Stubrick
“Not for the faint of heart, this book writhes under the reader’s gaze in a compelling dance punctuated by moments of shocking aesthetic clarity.” — Tatiana Ryckman, author of I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do)
“Gut Text is a schizoanalytically-DECONSTRUCTED Beckettian dream dreaming itself, an infestation of two-letter viruses poetically exploring their own bioplastic dreamscape. Avant-theoryfiction at its best[.]” — Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact
“Gut Text challenges the reader to question the integrity of their own sentience and corporeality, suggesting that existence is merely a choice, and one born out of vanity rather than an inherent virtue.” — B.R. Yeager, author of Amygdalatropolis
“[C]adavers on a thrill ride who are mining the alphabet to take pleasure in ... and endorse ... the unpredictability of meaning.” — Shane Jesse Christmass, author of Xerox Over Manhattan
“Mike Corrao again takes the oath of black blood, rendering in ink what can only be in ink, a book pure in its bookness.”— John Trefry, author of Apparitions of the Living
You are holding a living organism. Gut Text feels fear, pain, and desire. Within, you will follow four distinct personas as they form on the page, each seeking to transcend the limitations of their existence as they speak to you directly. In his newest release, Mike Corrao has created a challenging and unsettling exploration of identity, and the ways we see it manifest in the physical world.
Each persona carries with it a similar desire, but a different means of striving towards it. Slowly, the text begins to move, begins to change, correct its mistakes, and adjust to its restrictive ontology. Gut Text is not only alive, it is growing and learning. Witness the text creating itself, a parthenogenetic conception.
Interview with Vi Khi Nao at 3:AM Magazine
Review by Bryce Jones 3:AM Magazine
Review by Michael Prihoda at After the Pause
Feature by Jacob Singer on Entropy’s April/May Small Press Releases
Radio KFAI WRITE ON RADIO
Video GUT TEXT reading GUT TEXT by Mike Corrao & 11:11 Press
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Advance Praise for Gut Text
This book comprises pyrotechnics of text that retain a solid elevationto severe displacements of space and time. This book contains cadavers
on a thrill ride who are mining the alphabet to take pleasure in
... and endorse ... the unpredictability of meaning. Submerge yourself
... dear reader ... in redacted text that acts as possible photography ...
the author requests you to view him through black ink ... through
potential black smoke that turns as a scrying assistant. Mike Corrao
has written a great book ... my kind of book ... a book that is on the
verge of collapse where various pages depict asemic pictograms ...
where scrapings from past art and literature manifestoes assemble a
new structure that defiles the past.
— Shane Jesse Christmass, author of Belfie Hell
A disquieting and strangely beautiful exploration of text-as-entity. AsCorrao’s creatures wrestle with their various states of being (or nonbeing),
their yearnings toward the corporeal reflect humanity’s yearnings
toward the spiritual: a desire to become something greater than
their state allows. Ultimately, Gut Text challenges the reader to question
the integrity of their own sentience and corporeality, suggesting
that existence is merely a choice, and one born out of vanity rather
than an inherent virtue.
— B.R. Yeager, author of Amygdalatropolis
Ex-forming un-formation, not yet a map but an abstract sketch ofvectors indicating how to draw a set of infrathin Borgesian labyrinths,
epigenetics longing for a genome, embryogenesis in search of a dank
embryo, Mike Corrao’s Gut Text is a schizoanalytically-disconstructed
Beckettian dream dreaming itself, an infestation of two-letter viruses
poetically exploring their own bioplastic dreamscape. Avant-theoryfiction
at its best, Corrao’s book develops as a morphospatial field of
dysphoric atopias (“Every variation of me is a new entity inhabiting
this mobile assemblage”) imbued with an odic force which pursues
the chance of becoming organic without organs (“should I be made
organismally, or would you allow me to build myself out of new
parts?”). Like the depsyched collective eros of soldier ants gathering
to form a colony-body, the text morphs into an implausible codespell
of mineral-to-living dialectic vibration—an enticement to abandon
yourself to the invasion of a multitude of typefaced parasites
orbiting each other in epiexperimental gravitational speculation,
awaiting, with the demonic patience of text-love, to flagella-latch your
white-noised environment into unbearable gut joy.
— Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact
Mike Corrao again takes the oath of black blood,
rendering in ink what can only be in ink, a book pure in its bookness.
— John Trefry, author of Apparitions of the Living
Mike Corrao’s Gut Text is a formal experiment in abstraction, a ride
into language plucked from the mouth of its maker. Not for the faint
of heart, this book writhes under the reader’s gaze in a compelling
dance punctuated by moments of shocking aesthetic clarity.
— Tatiana Ryckman, author of I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do)
Gut Text reminds me of the sort of fiction I absolutely love to read;
one where there is no knowing exactly what is going to happen
next—everything and nothing, all at the same time, makes absolute
sense. Think of it as a sort of chewing up and then spitting out of
whatever you can think up and / or imagine (covered in bitumen and
bile, of course)! Seriously—in Gut Text, Corrao creates an anthropology
of the parallel dimension that exists only on the periphery of
what we know / perceive as normal. I hope that after the world has
ended and we’ve all melted back into a primordial goop, Gut Text is
also destroyed; only because it paints the portrait of a terrifying place
and time no one should ever desire to exist. Conceptually, there is an
interesting sort of ruin that occurs, as the novel progresses—and you
begin to realize that what is actually happening is a derealisation /
collapse of reality. I could see someone saying, “Read between the
lines and you’ll begin to understand the text,” but after page 13, there
are no lines! It’s like howling at the moon, except the moon doesn’t
exist and you are something that shouldn’t even be. I would say this
is surrealist literature with a purpose, but it’s more than that even (as
Surrealism itself can be so limiting). It’s a Dave Markson-style
mashup (which I love) with bits of Bolaño sprinkled about and then
doused and set afire in an extremely well-contained but severely
smoked-out Ashbery-esque kerosene fire. I experienced pareidolia
multiple times while reading Gut Text—some of the more abstract
moments caused allowed me to see images where images were not!
The idea of multiple discovery assumes there is no such thing as the
original idea from just one individual. For any great work or discovery,
there has to be that other person (or set of persons) doing the
same thing. Well… I don’t know that I have yet seen or read anything
else out there that is quite like Gut Text by Mike Corrao.
— Mike Kleine, author of Lonely Men Club and Kanley Stubrick
ISBN: 978-1-948687-06-5 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-948687-05-8 (paperback)