book data
216 ratings, 4.47 average rating, 28 reviews
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published
May 7th 1991
by Vintage
binding
Paperback
isbn
0679732276
(isbn13: 9780679732273)
description
Wojnarowicz is a controversial contemporary artist who drew national attention when the NEA withdrew a grant for the artist's gallery, Artist's Space,...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 322)
This book is so important to my understanding of the queer 80's and 90's, in a way I am not even sure is entirely fair. His prose poetry, brilliant conspiracy cum political philosophy, and precious/violent take on sexuality and the body relating to other bodies is a vibrant echo of what was, an what is still vibrating through the haunted house of modern gay history in the US. I love the way he speaks about the Queer who was the bane of the assimilationist gay America that all but won the 90's, b...more
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Read in July, 2008
I really didn't know what to expect with this book, but found it unsettling for many reasons. It is primarily a memoir of Wojnarowicz's life in the 80s during the height of the onset of the AIDS crisis. It is set in NYC and mostly in the East Village. I lived there too then and Wojnarowicz and I ran in the same circles. I recognized some of the people that he was talking about even though he had changed the names. It is powerfully written for the most part and there is no question that it brough...more
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Read in July, 2008
Wojnarowicz's story is a story we all need to read. A friend of mine put it succinctly "his book is about love and rage". The way he writes is really visceral, taking you back in time to cruising at the New York piers in the 70's and early 80's and what it was like to lose those you love to AIDS in a time when society completely turned their backs.
His essays about living as a gay man and an artist with HIV in the 80's is heartwrenching and inspiring. I appreciated the ...more
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Read in May, 2008
recommended to Skidmarquez by:
fiverecommends it for: Anyone
Wojnarowicz, for being a self taught writer and artist has rich, thick descriptions of the encounters with men in bathrooms, the incursion of the illness of the american landscape into his psyche, the political determinations of his moment, strung-out drug episodes, the AIDS crisis where he witnesses friend after friend succumb to the disease. Written about a really repressive and oft forgotten moment in American history where queers were not only being blamed for the AIDS crisis but also being ...more
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Read in January, 2004
recommended to Luke Dani by:
devon haynesrecommends it for: lovers & fighters
this book changed my life, actually.
i spent a lot of time while reading it grieving david wojnarowicz' death...he writes like thoughts rapid clip but also words feel exquisite. it's like reading the view out of a moving car, like not how language is told to be used, but how it is, something in motion. an anger out of love most familiar in the writing of james baldwin, this book is smoke from a rage-fire looking down into the heart of the fire. it makes me want to be near the heat of the body...more
i spent a lot of time while reading it grieving david wojnarowicz' death...he writes like thoughts rapid clip but also words feel exquisite. it's like reading the view out of a moving car, like not how language is told to be used, but how it is, something in motion. an anger out of love most familiar in the writing of james baldwin, this book is smoke from a rage-fire looking down into the heart of the fire. it makes me want to be near the heat of the body...more
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Read in January, 1991
This book altered me forever---my politics, my sentences, my sensibility, my sense of what I wanted from life and from existence, from my country, from what it could mean to 'have politics', or to 'have sex'---everything. Afterward everything was different. And I was glad.
Relieved, even.
Also, I have a signed copy I got when I was a store clerk at A Different Light Books in San Francisco in the late 80s.
Relieved, even.
Also, I have a signed copy I got when I was a store clerk at A Different Light Books in San Francisco in the late 80s.
when i was a 17 year old teenage-wee-thing one of the folks who took me under their wing/my roomate gave me a stack of books to read (queer education) and this one was my favorite. Now you may be thinking, "what an awful thing for a babyqueer to read and feel hopeless about their future..." but i loved it. It was sweet and beautiful and heartbroken and hopeful and hopeless all at once.
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This is really a five star book, except toward the end the rhythm of erratic form breaks down even farther, and it winds up feeling like the sections should have been organized. Having said that, this book is so unique, so forward, and almost taboo with its political and social honesty.
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Read in January, 1996
recommends it for:
ALL YOU QUEER DARLINGS
this book is so fantastic. DW, a seminal writer/artist homo of 1970s and 1980s NYC. He is beautiful and gritty. Heartbreaking and uplifting. He's a much more imperfect and authentic version of the queer-american gothic-teen whore faggot image we all projected onto JT Leroy.
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I think I have come to appreciate this book more since I finished it as I have come to know more about the man who wrote it. Some might argue that has little to do with how one might rate this book in and of itself. I say: shut up, read the book then go see some of his art.
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Read in June, 2004
recommends it for:
the politically inclined queers
based on a strangers recommendation, i picked up this book and have been an obsessed wojnarowicz fan ever since. his art is amazingly intense and his writing ranges from disturbing to humourous and, above all else, brilliant.
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When Wojnarowicz lost his fight to AIDS in the early 90's, the world lost an outspoken and brilliant soul. This book is a collection of writings from the late activist, artist, and writer. My favorite of his by far.
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one of my favorite books. it can be re-read so many times and continues to offer insight, inspiration, and loss. i know this sounds cheesy. but it is a great book. almost pema chodron for the dirty queer.
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Intense and in many ways amazing, but...
not the thing to be reading as your father is dying in the next room. Or maybe it's perfect. I can't decide.
not the thing to be reading as your father is dying in the next room. Or maybe it's perfect. I can't decide.
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Yep, this one is in Vermont, too. Damn artist colony killed all my brain cells. Or the booze. Whatever.
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Read in October, 2005
Horrifying, mesmorizing, disturbing, beautiful queer hustler 1980's New York artist life experience.
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Read in January, 1998
what are knives?
turn them right side up
once you find a position
that makes another thing
happen
turn them right side up
once you find a position
that makes another thing
happen
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Read in January, 1992
art, radicalism, the immense fragility and durability of life. read it the year he died.
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Read in September, 2001
Beautiful, touching, intimate portrait of the artist. Great insight into his existence.
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currently-reading (on 24 people's shelves)
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queer (on 5 people's shelves)
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quotes from this book
""I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this."
"
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