Timothy Stock

Shipley has accomplished a meditation on gender, time, and the forms of life that is a gift to his readers. Shipley gives gifts in layers. We observe each by its inversion into another: poets and psychologists, bits of trivia or miscellany rest alongside intimacy, and bodies appear as bound until they are freed, or free until bound. However precarious the balance of these inversions, we find ourselves sustained by fidelity to memory, sensuality and the body. Ultimately, in Shipley’s poems and prose, we see a humorous and heart-felt uncertainty about the duality of boys and girls, and the tone itself […]