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Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

David Wojnarowicz

4.45 · Rating details · 2,452 ratings · 220 reviews

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays - a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most ...more

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Paperback, 288 pages

Published May 7th 1991 by Vintage

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Lists with This Book

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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May 28, 2019 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019, recs

Expansive and enraged, Close to the Knives sketches a surreal portrait of life in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The memoir gathers together a series of searing essays that roam among a wide range of topics, from the author’s traumatic childhood to the American state’s network of oppression. In ethereal prose, Wojnarowicz lends testimony to the destruction of a subculture, while reflecting on the roles addiction, art, and community play during an epidemic. The work’s interested in ...more

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Jul 11, 2009 mark monday rated it it was amazing

Shelves: queertime, alpha-team, he-said-she-said, mnemonic-devices

this abrasive, masterfully written, self-eviscerating, entirely unsentimental memoir is one that is practically boiling over with anger and lust and menace. it was an influential book in its own place and time... much like wojnarowicz's equally visceral yet haunting art. the free-flowing, stream of conscious writing recounts the author's life, his dreams, ambitions, failures, life on the streets, life with men, and - quite memorably - his dark and vindictive fantasies of vengeance on those who w ...more

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Feb 08, 2020 Thomas rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, lgbtq, own-physical

A powerful and vivid memoir about life in New York during the AIDS epidemic. I feel privileged having grown up as a gay man in the 21st century without much awareness of the AIDS epidemic, so reading Close to the Knives provided much needed context for the violence and stigma queer people experienced at the hands of the state. I most appreciated David Wojnarowicz’s boldness and honesty; he's unafraid to directly criticize the state and the government for not protecting its LGBTQ+ members. He wri ...more

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Dec 27, 2007 Alexander rated it it was amazing

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. ...more

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Feb 08, 2021 Vartika rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Essential Reading | 4.5 stars

In calling the chopped-up, raging prose of this autobiography-by-way-of-essays a "memoir of disintegration," artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz was not playing around. Close to the Knives is a haunting, visceral, and often labyrinthine document of the undocumented: the AIDS epidemic, nuclear chauvinism, the rise of neoliberalism, and the devastating cruelty worked by the social and political institutions of power throughout the 80s to terrorise and marginalis Essential Reading | 4.5 stars

In calling the chopped-up, raging prose of this autobiography-by-way-of-essays a "memoir of disintegration," artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz was not playing around. Close to the Knives is a haunting, visceral, and often labyrinthine document of the undocumented: the AIDS epidemic, nuclear chauvinism, the rise of neoliberalism, and the devastating cruelty worked by the social and political institutions of power throughout the 80s to terrorise and marginalise the silenced and the unwanted; era-defining injustices that have been papered over in popular memory with rainbow brite and nostalgic dance hits.

Published in 1991; at the height of AIDS denial and a few months before Wojnarowicz's own death of AIDS-related complications at the age of 37; the disjointed, jagged essays in Close to the Knives use personal experiences, queer desire, grief and radical honesty to express the disorientation of growing up and surviving amidst the state-sponsored hypocrisy and hollowness of contemporary American ‘values.’

"My queerness was a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society"

Wojnarowicz's text opens with an essay about an adolescence where neglect, abuse, homelessness and prostitution drove him to hallucinations, and dives headfirst into a reality driven by grief and rage and hunger; by the degeneracy and lies of the family, the suburb, the Church, and the State. It is a manifesto against the silencing of minorities that questions the "pre-invented world" of the "one-tribe nation" that promises a life of security and support only to those who embrace its lies, illusions, and "hatred of diversity." In using language as a weapon, Close to the Knives is a raw and lucid statement of determination. It is gripping and beautiful and its violence speaks power to that which surrounds us all.

But most of all, it is the testament of a gay man coming to terms with his own mortality and with the deliberately hastened death of entire communities of dissent and difference. While writing of the violent rage this brought about, Wojnarowicz writes also of the overwhelming grief, the anger of how normalised these deaths had become, like "passing a dead bird in the street and all you can do it is acknowledge it and move on."

Today, at a time when Pride often devolves into a purely aesthetic act, we tend to forget just how difficult things once were, and what our lives of easy visibility are really built on. In the title essay of this volume, Wojnarowicz writes, burning with urgency, about his ex-lover, friend, and mentor Peter Hujar's last days and the various vulnerabilities and waves of hopelessness they went through. In the penultimate essay of the volume; where he shifts between multiple perspectives to investigate the suicide of an acquintance that rattled him amidst the numbness of the epidemic; it is a different kind of compulsion to death he tries to grapple with.

Today, 30 years later, the conservatism, neglect, and manufactured lies Wojnarowicz rails against are resurgent. One realises that the repetition between the essays, like the refrain in the postscript—"Smell the flowers while you can"—is a deliberate act of forcefulness. For some, this book could be life-changing; for others, a reminder that we have so much worth fighting for. Close to the Knives will radicalise the reader and invigorate the fight in them not on the weight of theory, nor that of mere emotion, but on the essence of living:

“With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom.
I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.”

...more

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Apr 26, 2013 Jonathan rated it really liked it

Essential reading for anyone (and that should be all of you) remotely interested in the early days of the AIDS crisis and in some excellent, angry, powerfully erotic prose. I have read a lot of LGBT literature over the years, and have no idea how I managed to miss this one.

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May 21, 2020 Fede rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: american-canadian, memoir

New York in the 80s was Satan's rumpus room.
There were Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman. There were Julian Schnabel, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch, along with hundreds of other major and minor talents living, loving, working, fucking, dying in museums and slums, cool nightclubs and shooting galleries, fancy restaurants and seedy diners, hotels and ratholes, gentrified avenues and ghettos. There were high-class coke and cheap smack, tycoo New York in the 80s was Satan's rumpus room.
There were Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman. There were Julian Schnabel, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch, along with hundreds of other major and minor talents living, loving, working, fucking, dying in museums and slums, cool nightclubs and shooting galleries, fancy restaurants and seedy diners, hotels and ratholes, gentrified avenues and ghettos. There were high-class coke and cheap smack, tycoons building empires and stray kids sniffing glue, Neocon repression and revolutionary enthusiasm, Reaganomics and street gangs. A place of potential and decay just like fin-de-siècle Paris, with the Goncourt brothers recording in their diaries the glories and miseries of a modern world bursting with genius and rotting with syphilis.
Except this time it wasn't syphilis. It was AIDS.
From the mid-80s on death came in a huge, relentless wave. A disease some regarded as a welcome cleansing, a purifying fire that would rid the world of faggots, niggers, junkies and, hopefully, a few anarchoid misfits too - those who had never learnt to hold their tongue and even dared dabble with (degenerate) art. And were now dying like flies. Or rats, if they hadn't managed to become rich and famous in the meantime.
One of them vicious-tongued queers was artist/writer/filmmaker David Wojnarowicz, who lived through the light and darkness of an era of absolute polarities and died of AIDS at the age of 37. An eclectic talent, a homsexual, a man who wanted us to know what it was like to be him and therefore left us a memoir that reads like "Naked Lunch" and sounds like an Iggy Pop song.

Strictly speaking, this book has very little to do with autobiography as such, what with the lack of chronological order and the non-linear narration through fragmented flashbacks and memories. It's rather a collection of expressionist essays about the author's perception of himself and his kind, his life used as a vessel to convey images, emotions and sensations, both real and oneiric. It's an artist's outlook on himself and all those belonging to whatever minorities (racial, sexual, ideological) are struggling to survive in late 20th century USA; on the feeling of being robbed of all dignity by a system of hatred and planned neglect, overtly advocated or tacitly accepted as a matter of fact.
It's therefore a manifesto against silence: it was indeed silence that allowed AIDS to spread all over the world. Silence like a shroud in which the dead were wrapped before being thrown in society's trashbin.

These essays are heterogeneous, though not uneven in quality.
Wojnarowicz's is an account of street wanderings and road trips, with gorgeous descriptions of the American landscapes; of musings on architecture and art; of heartrending stories of friends and lovers dying of AIDS; of memories (the abusive family, the adolescence spent whoring in New York); of clandestine encounters with strangers - in toilets, truck cabins, motel rooms, dilapidated warehouses... the places where the law confines all sexuality deemed unacceptable.
The underworld of paedophiles, hustlers, winos and queers of his early teens was indeed bound to become part of his adulthood, at the core of his creativity and need to unveil the dark side of the American Dream - all those who are forgotten or deliberately left behind. Just have a look at Wojnarowicz's famous series of photographs "Rimbaud in New York" (1978-79): b/w portraits of a guy wearing an Arthur Rimbaud paper mask on his face posing in subway cars, cafes, industrial areas, rundown apartment blocks and warehouses; standing, leaning against a wall, pissing, doing heroin or just sitting, the mask staring expressionlessly at the camera. Those pictures depict the very same environment in which Wojnarowicz grew up, the only one he truly cherishes - because that hell was the only place where he could be himself. Among those perverts and bums he was allowed to be the way he was. Surrounded by a violence that, if anything, was not repressive; dealing with a society that was beastly but not malignant.

Wojnarowicz's writing is beautiful, explicit without ever being gross. His vision shifting from lucidity to hallucination, each of these texts encompasses the whole range of literary possibilities by alternating languages and styles. He talks about inner vision and mind-numbing television, filthy slums and blue skies, beauty and Kaposi's sarcoma. But then again, it's an artist's writing, the work of a man gifted with a heightened perception of the world and of himself.
And it's politically, or rather morally charged too. In fact some of these essays are among the most informative writings I've ever come across with regards to AIDS and 20th-century homophobic paranoia: the carefully orchestrated campaigns aiming to prevent the funding of medical research, the anti-gay legal system, the instrumental use of fear and prejudice. They spare nothing to the reader, including facts and statistics that are hardly ever talked about.
Which is quite obvious, since Wojnarowicz's aim is to turn language - either literary or visual - into a weapon to finally give voice to the voiceless, vibility to the invisible. One must bear in mind that he himself was a homosexual, got AIDS, lost friends and lovers and eventually died of it; it's first-hand witness he provides is with, hence the urgency of his message.
He knew what he was talking about and wanted us to know, too.

One is not supposed to 'enjoy' this book.
On the contrary, one's supposed to feel uncomfortable with it, with the world it sheds light on - and with its author too, if that's what it takes for the reader to open his eyes and start thinking. ...more

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Apr 12, 2008 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites

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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Mar 28, 2014 Peter Landau rated it it was amazing

How come so few people know who David Wojnarowicz is today? People who should know. I didn't know much about him other than a name I saw around that I couldn't pronounce. I still can't pronounce it, but I'm going to learn how. It's voy-nah-ROH-vitch, according to his NYT obit. That's important.

His memoir is impressionistic, wandering, grammatically loose, but drew me in slowly and then so tight I couldn't escape. Now I want to read everything by him and about him. At first, I was, Ugh, another c ...more

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May 19, 2020 Paul Ataua rated it it was ok

I became interested in his art a few years ago. As I found out more about him, I became fascinated by his life. Being someone whose greatest risks include not taking an umbrella when there is a ten percent chance of rain, I am always drawn to characters who lived their lives at the edge, and no one fits that description more than Wojnarowicz - gay , male prostitute, political activist, AIDS sufferer, and so on. I decided on the audiobook version, something I sometimes do with memoirs/ biographie ...more

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Jun 22, 2014 Aonarán rated it really liked it

I read this book in a completely scattered order. It seems like it's a collection of different essays he wrote for different audiences, so reading it that way worked well for me.

At times Wojnarowicz seems completely damning everything - the family, the state, civilization, police, doctors, etc etc - but at other times says we need to legislate this or that change - perhaps a reflection of writing for different audiences.

Something about his writing that I can't quite put into words really spoke t ...more

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Oct 12, 2014 Allan rated it liked it

This memoir was published in 1991 by the artist David Wojnarowicz, and is a pretty difficult read. It's a very angry book made up of chapters about different aspects of life and society at that time, and given the author's personal circumstances (a gay man who has contracted AIDS) one can understand why.

He is scathing about the US federal government's, NYC administration's and Catholic church's lack of action in tackling the virus, both through education and treatment programmes. He details the ...more

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Dec 09, 2016 Mel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, rugged-individuals, utopia-or-dystopia, read-in-2016, some-of-my-best-reads, lgbtqia, from-the-library, non-fiction, autobiography-memoir, alternate-history

Wow! This was a really great book! Much of it (sadly) suddenly pertinent to right now! I could quote something off every page. Parts of this brought back some tough memories and was very hard to read. This author does not try to sugar coat anything, so this is not for the faint of heart. Great writing! Loved it! 5 stars and one of my best reads of 2016. (Probably THE best read of 2016)

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Apr 21, 2017 Callum McAllister rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Less of a memoir, more of an essay collection, with each piece hanging somewhere on the spectrum between personal and political. Most of which were pretty sprawling and adventurous, without too much stringing them together - in a good way. You end up just sinking straight into the prose. It had all the things I liked about the beat gen without all the stuff I really don't. ...more

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May 24, 2015 Jack Tomascak rated it it was amazing

This is the best book I have ever read. Honestly I don't know how to convey to you how critical it is that you read this book. ...more

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Apr 14, 2019 Chris Flinterman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lgbtq, engels

A book that has lost none of its urgency. Written beautifully, yet displaying a world that is raw and hidden. An eye opener.

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Nov 26, 2019 Easton Smith rated it it was amazing

Before I tell you why you should read this book, I should first say why you shouldn't. It's filled to overflowing with violence of the worst kind; cruelty and abuse and angry, dark ruminations. It's a book will quickly dive into an alleyway to witness a murder, to uncover a deep, rotting trauma. It's a book that takes place in a moldy bathroom stall, in the smoggiest city, the morgue. All of that, and it also has its repetitions (likely a product of it being a collection of previously published ...more

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Jan 26, 2021 George K. Ilsley rated it liked it

Shelves: memoir, poetry, gay, fantasy, glbt

A collection of prose poem essays that are dense, evocative, powerful — and at times unreadable. This memoir has its fans, and was recommended as a document of the early aids epidemic. It is also a document of abuse, addiction, prostitution, life on the street, pointlessness, anger, outrage, and slippery consciousness.

I would have another go at this, when I had a year or two to just read one page at a time.

Having lived through this time, this book was intensely triggering.

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Jan 03, 2008 Lex rated it really liked it

Shelves: theory-gay-and-otherwise, novels, biographies

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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Nov 06, 2011 Michael Dipietro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lifelong-influence, beautiful-misanthropy, queer-this-narrative

I am almost without words for this book. It was incredibly dark and painful to read, and yet extremely seductive. Drilling the same points home over and over about evil people in state and religious drag, effecting a quiet holocaust with their mishandling of AIDS and with constant efforts to make queer people, queer lives and identities invisible.... I began to feel the same desolation and ennui that Wojnarowicz describes in his own experience, so eloquently. The ending is extremely visceral; I ...more

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Sep 06, 2012 Riotaccordion loeffler rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020toread

Maybe the best book i've ever read.
fucking and magic
and nihilism.

It's dark.
and so good. ...more

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Oct 06, 2019 Jackson rated it it was amazing

There aren't enough stars on Goodreads to give this one; five certainly doesn't do it justice. Close to the Knives is possibly the most powerful book I've ever read, and if I'd had a highlighter handy to mark all the profound quotes and passages I'd like to reference at a later time I'd have turned a third of the book yellow.

My copy has a pullquote on the cover by William S. Burroughs praising Wojnarowicz, and a few of the more critical reviews on Goodreads suggest that it is "disjointed." I was There aren't enough stars on Goodreads to give this one; five certainly doesn't do it justice. Close to the Knives is possibly the most powerful book I've ever read, and if I'd had a highlighter handy to mark all the profound quotes and passages I'd like to reference at a later time I'd have turned a third of the book yellow.

My copy has a pullquote on the cover by William S. Burroughs praising Wojnarowicz, and a few of the more critical reviews on Goodreads suggest that it is "disjointed." I was wary going in, and the first 23 pages of the book (the first two very short chapters/essays, "Losing the Form in Darkness" and "In the Shadow of the American Dream") had me worried, as they are indeed disjointed, directionless navel-gazing. I almost gave up, and I'm so glad I didn't.

We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and in that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. (p. 37)

Close to the Knives is many things.

It is an important, highly emotional historical document written about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and '90s by someone who was there, on the ground floor, watching his friends die, and ultimately died himself because of it. He savagely outs those in power -- think right-wing politicians and church leaders, primarily male -- as the information-suppressing, bigoted, and hugely evil brutes that they were, and continue to be.

Who knows that the vatican and the catholic archdiocese have issued statements that "it is a more terrible thing to use a condom than to contract AIDS." (p. 160)

During the years of the Reagan administration our president was completely silent about the spread of this epidemic. It took almost eight years just to have a few public posters dealing with AIDS and these posters were only printed in english, as opposed to spanish or any other language. The small AIDS campaign effected by city governments was so unimaginative that it could only state: DON'T ASK FOR AIDS, DON'T GET IT. One doesn't get AIDS by "Asking for it." One contracts AIDS through ignorance and the denial of pertinent information that could be used by people to safeguard their sexual activities. (p. 134)

It is a travelogue that takes you across the United States and through the dregs of New York City in a very specific time, far away from now when the average apartment in Manhattan costs about a million and a half dollars.

It is a laser-focused study and critique of our American society. Our false morals, the blind eye we turn to abuses that do not directly affect us, our perverse relationship with media, our glaring hypocrisies.

Dismissal is policy in America. ... If there is homelessness in our streets it is the fault of those who have no homes -- they chose to live that way. If there is a disease such as AIDS it is somehow the fault of those who contract that disease -- they chose to have that disease. If three black men are shot by a white man on a subway train -- somehow they chose to be shot by that man. ... Most people tend to accept this system of the moral code and thus feel quite safe from any terrible event or problem such as homelessness or AIDS or nonexistent medical care or rampant crime or hunger or unemployment or racism or sexism simply because they go to sleep every night in a house or apartment or dormitory whose clean rooms or smooth walls or regular structures of repeated daily routines provide them with a feeling of safety that never gets intruded up on by the events outside. (p. 150-151)

It is a study of mortality; practically a staring contest with death itself, looking it in the eye and discussing it frankly and directly. In such an emotional set of essays, Wojnarowicz's view of death frequently changes -- sometimes he seems to wish for death, sometimes he seems to want nothing more than to live, if not out of love of life but for feeling that he has much left to accomplish on Earth -- but he deals with it head on, which is more than you can say about many people.

Americans can't deal with death unless they own it. If they own it, they will celebrate it, like in the air force base museum of the atomic bomb, where whole families of camera-toting tourists gather after the required i.d. security checks. In the gray-carpeted rooms, they walk the mazes of portable screens and platforms and enlarged photographs of death and incineration as seen from a discreet distance. The distance is far enough so you can't see the bodies, only the architecture. (p. 35)

It is a personal history. It is a character study of the people in his life, presented as they are, or were. Wojnarowicz can be sentimental and affectionate, but never sugarcoats the faults and activities of his peers.

It is the study of a seedy underworld I'll never be a part of, yet it is also an homage to the preciousness and brevity of every life, and a celebration of the fact that we are here for just a little while -- and that so many of us don't acknowledge that temporariness until we are staring death in the face. He explains what it is like to watch your friends die, one by one; examines how they deal with their lives coming to horrific ends, one after the other.

We all turned to the bed and his body was completely still; and then there was a very strong and slow intake of breath and then stillness and then one more intake of breath and he was gone. ... I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body's energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediately know my thoughts? But I try and speak anyway and try and say something in case he's afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up, but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can't form words and maybe I'm the one who needs words, maybe I'm the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, "All I want is some sort of grace." And then the water comes from my eyes. (p. 102-103)

It is one man's story of what it is like to be gay, to endure things that people who are not likely cannot imagine; and though he is one person telling his story, much of what he says is undoubtedly experienced by many others.

I remember when I was eight-and-a-half ... For months I searched the public library for information on my "condition" and found only sections of novels or manuals that described me as either a speedfreak sitting on a child's swing in a playground at dusk inventing new words for faggot...or that people like me spoke with lisps and put bottles up their asses and wore dresses and had limp wrists and every novel I read that had references to queers described them as people who killed or destroyed themselves for no other reason than their realization of how terrible they were for desiring men and I felt I had no choice but to grow up and assume these shapes and characteristics. .. And in every playground, invariably, there's a kid who screamed FAGGOT! in frustration at some other kid and the sound of it resonated in my shoes, that instant solitude, that breathing glass wall no one else saw. (p. 104-105)

It is a lengthy study of a tragic character -- the final 111 pages dedicated solely to his friend Dakota, a gay man and addict who committed suicide, whose parents destroyed all of his art, writing, manuscripts -- everything he left behind that was evidence he ever lived. Even the letters he wrote to Wojnarowicz could not be published due to copyright issues, his parents being the owners of such copyrights.

Suicide is a form of death that contains a period of time before it to which my mind can walk back into and imagine a gesture or word that might tie an invisible rope around that person's foot to prevent them from floating free of the surface of the earth. ... All I see is his absence, a void, a dark smudge in the air where he previously occupied space: "Man, why did you do it? Why didn't you wait for the possibilities to reveal themselves in this shit country, on this planet? Why didn't you fucking go swimming in the cold gray ocean instead? Why didn't you call?" (p. 241)

It is simply too much for me to write about. I just finished the book today, and though it is 276 pages, it feels like the longest book I've ever read because it is so dense. So much righteous anger and rage, so much beauty and sadness. So many harsh truths. The book winds down as Wojnarwicz flashes back and forth between stories of the abuse he endured in childhood, the suicide of his friend, and a bullfight he witnesses in Mexico not long after his AIDS diagnosis.

...the bull's legs jerk out spasmodically, blood issues from its nose and mouth, and it is dead. It excretes a stream of shit from its behind into the pale dust. Smell the flowers while you can. (p. 273)

I can't really formulate a typical "review," and I really don't remember if a book has ever left me feeling so overwhelmed upon completion as this one. I've kind of written a lot here, mostly quotes directly from the book, but it feels as if I've written nothing. Hopefully enough to convince those who've read this review to pick up the book. I'd like to hand out a copy to anyone with a heart, and maybe some to those who don't who might grow one Grinch-like; I believe it is an essential read. ...more

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Sep 27, 2020 Kate Savage rated it really liked it

A hard and heavy and playful and cutting memoir. The hardest for me: sitting with the drive to violence that leaks out as the last resistance to perpetual state-sanctioned murder. The most rewarding for me: reading this during the COVID pandemic, letting the history of the AIDS epidemic enrich and challenge the way I think about societal and political responses to contagious diseases. Wojnarowicz is credited as inspiring Act Up activists to spread the ashes of their dead loved ones on the White ...more

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Dec 14, 2020 Elizabeth Smart rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020-read

Reading this at this particular moment during another global pandemic is gutting. I wonder how it would make David Wojnarowicz feel to know that the government is failing us all yet again: a more diverse group of people, but for the same reasons— the expendability of the vulnerable. “So many things got so much better, David,” I would tell him, “but so many things got so much worse.”

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Apr 24, 2017 Connor Murphy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Reading this felt like bleeding. The raw fury, desperation and, most importantly, the love that radiates from this memoir is overwhelmingly beautiful. It bruises, it shatters, it roars with an intensity that I have experienced in only a handful of books. As I am writing this I am on the verge of tears. I will always remember this book - more than that, it will make itself apparent every day; on transport, in friendships, in romance, as I get up in the morning... in all of these quiet moments, I ...more

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Dec 18, 2016 Mandy rated it did not like it

Artist and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz has written a powerful, angry polemic and memoir, often a graphic one, and I can see from the many reviews that it is a much loved and admired volume. I accept that I am perhaps not the intended reader, but I found little to engage me here and little to relate to. I learnt a lot from it, especially about how the growing AIDS crisis was dealt with at the time and I can understand Wojnarowicz’s anger, but that doesn’t make it good literature. It’s a chal ...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Katie rated it it was amazing

“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.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration ...more

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Aug 31, 2017 Dee rated it it was ok

Yes this book is full of some great writing IF you can get back the author's stylistic choices: run-on phrases, run-on sentences., run-on paragraphs, run-on passages, run-on pages, run-on chapters. I think there is some real genius here if you can get past all that. Good luck! ...more

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Feb 25, 2018 Merritt K. rated it it was amazing

Even if you aren't as deeply into the subject matter of 80s/90s gay life in New York as I am, Wojnarowicz's prose is so engrossing that it won't matter. Incredible. ...more

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Aug 25, 2020 Doreen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: pleasure-read

I wouldn't exactly call this a pleasure-read (the shelf I placed it in), more like a necessary read, another one of those stained, yellow paged paperbacks I've moved around with for years, starting and then putting it back, that I finally read. I'd heard about David W. for many years, and was reminded of this book most recently through a review I read of Olivia Laing's book The Lonely City (that I haven't read yet).

The book is a time-capsule, the writing tormented in the best kind of way, not o I wouldn't exactly call this a pleasure-read (the shelf I placed it in), more like a necessary read, another one of those stained, yellow paged paperbacks I've moved around with for years, starting and then putting it back, that I finally read. I'd heard about David W. for many years, and was reminded of this book most recently through a review I read of Olivia Laing's book The Lonely City (that I haven't read yet).

The book is a time-capsule, the writing tormented in the best kind of way, not overly written, nor filled with pathos, but gripping and labyrinthine, a writer confronting his own mortality as a gay man living through an epidemic and addressing an array of taboo topics and singular experiences of an artist trying to survive the hollowness of contemporary US culture. I'd forgotten, maybe purposely, maybe ageing, how awful the 80s really were for so many people and find it weird that the decade has become cemented in a pop culture history of one hit wonders you dance to at a nightclub (at least pre-pandemic). Close to the Knives, however, is a raw and personal countertake on the 80s through its weaving of political and social history from a queer perspective: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, AIDS, the rise of neoliberalism as an economic system, yuppies. As a sexual minority and an artist, W. has the ability to connect all that is wrong with America under Reagan to his own life experiences, so passages of anger toward Jesse Helms or toward those in power at the complete disregard for acknowledging the AIDS epidemic are part of a consciousness that is continually attempting to make meaning out of one’s own and a nation’s brokenness.

I had to reread passages several times as the writing is dense and lyrical, maddening sentences that you have to hang onto as they speed along. I even read the first few pages again when I got about halfway through and which made a lot more sense. The style seems to intentionally disorient, the prose at times is extremely oblique. He's a writer who doesn't pander to audience and one has to be prepared not just to be a voyeur to his world but be a part of it, to read without judgment. Many of the essays connect to each other through common themes of pain and suffering with suicide held out as a possible solution to existence and a punk rejection of all that is conventional, skirting society's periphery in pre-gentrified 80s NY as Othered. W- had a fierce determination to get it all down, to honor the lives of men who would be perceived by dominant culture as lowlifes, drifting and grifting, embracing chaos as a way of being free from societal constraints in whatever form: anonymous public sex, violence, travel, addiction, art, murder, a complete rejection of society, and to argue as a subtext that art can be a form of protest, a way to achieve self-determination and self-representation as a sexual minority. ...more

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About David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz

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David Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on ...more

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“Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.” — 53 likes

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