kevin mcpherson eckhoff | The Pain Itself

kevin mcpherson eckhoff  

The Pain Itself  

Los Angeles, USA: Insert Blanc Press, 2021

142 pp., 22 x 15 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

kevin mcpherson eckhoff is a poet, publisher, comedian, actor, teacher and editor, and often each of these things bleed into his work. 

There is only one review at goodreads.com for The Pain Itself , and it assigns one star out of five. It is from mcpherson eckhoff himself. It reminds me of the time Harmony Korine appeared on Letterman to promote his artist book Crackup at the Race Riots. The talk show host presses him to endorse his own book and Korine replies "I'd probably read an older book". 

Annoying, my god, this book. Occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure a reader some great pleasure, but this isn't one of them. Fifty-one grammars duel for the pain itself. And the easy hatred, my god. He/She/It's all ill-advised pulpiness to me. Don't say I promised you pleasure.   

- Rachel Zolf

 

Kevin McPherson Eckhoff has persisted in reading what was meant to be illegible, or irrelevant, or what Robert Smithson might have referred to as "language to be looked at" rather than words to be read. Undesigning the cipher of a place-holder, the matrix of layout meant merely to give space, he has transformed geometry into signification. In the process he renders "not the euphemism, [but rather] it": what the sheer materiality of language insists on continuing to say despite our best efforts to muffle, disrupt, or ignore it.   

- Craig Dworkin