A self-portrait and central image in Ed Steck's forthcoming autobiographical exploration,
A Place Beyond Shame (Wonder, 2023), this 4x6" portrait is available in an edition of 30.
About the book:
Ed Steck’s
A Place Beyond Shame is a long-form poetic exploration of autobiographical trauma.
Place is an excavation of memory linked to topography, site, and sight: the bleak expanse of plagued rural landscapes; addiction and terror; the house or the home; and a personal archive of horror, adult, and exploitation films.
A Place Beyond Shame follows a father and a son as they transform into "Ghoul" and "Son of Ghoul." They dub films to tape, loiter in the woods and search for UFOs amidst the shock and horror of secrecies hidden behind the walls of the everyday. If when you are reading this book and the horrors become too real, repeat to yourself: it’s only a book, it’s only a book, it’s only a book…
Read a selection from
A Place Beyond Shame here.
"Ed Steck's A Place Beyond Shame is a harrowing, original, and endlessly surprising book. Shapeshifting in our hands as we read it, it is as scary and wondrous as the horror films it not only references, but writes into itself. The horror genre has long been a space to explore the terrors of childhood, the way a parent can become a ghoul, to finally confess, in a scream not a whimper, all the secret things we've hidden under the bed. This book reminds me it's in the darkness, not the light, that we finally face ourselves." -- Kate Durbin, Author of Hoarders and E! Entertainment.
Ed Steck is the author of A Place Beyond Shame, An Interface for a Fractal Landscape, The Garden, Mountain Forge Serviceberry Systems, David Horvitz: Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film, and others. His work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, including for the Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Libraire Yvon Lambert, High Desert Test Sites, and more. He is a recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry, Pittsburgh Greater Arts Council, and the Pittsburgh Foundation. He lives in Pittsburgh.