Bibliography--Books by Wojnarowicz

About

Wojnarowicz was a prolific writer whose work included diatribes, diaries, poetry, comic books, and monologues based off of real people he met and interviewed. Poetry was his earliest - and least successful - artistic pursuit as an adult living on his own in New York City. Wojnarowicz had a conflicted relationship to language, considering it part of the "pre-invented world" that governed everything, and which he was always trying to break out of. But he also believed that writing could be used (like photography) to tell an alternative history that challenged those in power.

Sounds In the Distance (1982) / The Waterfront Journals (1997)

Wojnarowicz collected the experiences of a wide-variety of marginal figures (whom he believed existed outside or on the edge of the pre-invented world), which he converted into (partially fictionalized) monologues. He published these monologues in the 1982 collection Sounds in the Distance, published by Max Blagg at Aloes Books, London, with an introduction by William S. Burroughs. A number of the stories have been identified as being based on Wojnarowicz's own life, or at least they bear similarities to events that he narrated as his own experiences in other works.

Sounds in the Distance was converted into a theatrical production by Bill Rice in 1983. The production was put on by his theater company, Turmoil (which Rice founded with artists Allen Frame and Kirsten Bates), in the backyard of his building, and was thus dubbed Turmoil in the Garden. Nan Goldin was one of the performers.

After Wojnarowicz's death, Sounds in the Distance was acquired by Grove/Atlantic Press, who reissued it in 1997 under the title The Waterfront Journals. This version included several additional monologues that Wojnarowicz had written after the publication of Sounds in the Distance. This version was edited by Amy Scholder, who also wrote the introduction.

Material relating to Sounds in the Distance can be found in the Wojanrowicz collection at the Fales Library, Series III, Subseries A, Container 1, Box 6.

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991)

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration is a collection of some of Wojnarowicz's most powerful essays, which was published by Vintage (Random House) in 1991. The original cover was a close up of his photo Untitled (Buffalos). It was subsequently re-released, in 2014, by Open Road Media, as part of a series of his books which included republished versions of Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, The Waterfront Journals, and In the Shadow of the American Dream. Each of these new editions features a black and white self-portrait on the cover.

According to Cynthia Carr, Wojnarowicz let the publisher release it as nonfiction, "even though he thought of it as 'a fusion of fiction and nonfiction.'" Wojnarowicz had begun developing some of the essay Wojnarowicz as far back as the late seventies.

This collection includes "Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell," Wojnarowicz's piece for the catalog to Nan Goldin's 1990 show at Artist's Space Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, which the NEA cited as the reason they withdrew funding from the show, sparking an enormous controversy over art and political speech. It also includes Wojnarowicz's most straightforward explanation of one of the central themes of his work, "the pre-invented world:"

The world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step. A place where by the virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packages world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I've always felt like an alien.

The original manuscript, notes, and some letters relating to Close to the Knives can be found in the Wojanrowicz collection at the Fales Library, Series III, Subseries A, Container 1, Box 4.

Memories that Smell Like Gasoline (1992)

Memories that Smell Like Gasoline is an art book that was posthumously published by Artspace Books in 1992. The slim volume combined four short stories (all drawn from Wojnarowicz's life), with black and white watercolor paintings of anonymous gay sex in porn theaters, and ink drawings of his own sexual experiences. It was subsequently re-released, in 2014, by Open Road Media, as part of a series of his books which included republished versions of Close to the Knives, The Waterfront Journals, and In the Shadow of the American Dream. Each of these new editions features a black and white self-portrait on the cover.

According to Cynthia Carr,

The four stories were all about anonymous sex-the sweet pleasures of cruising but also the dangers. There's a constant sense in these texts of at least latent violence, which sometimes turns real and potentially deadly. The title story is about the night he was in the lobby of a movie theater and suddenly saw a man who'd raped him when he was a teenager... He also included the story, from the 1980 journal, about the night he met a deaf and mute man who followed him into the West Fourth Street subway station and, on the empty mezzanine between the Eighth Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines, began to simultaneously blow him and rob him... He wanted to analyze what he'd seen in this guy and in the other violent, unpredictable men he sometimes found himself attracted to. 'It's something about violence as a distancing tool to break down the organized world. It's the weird freedom in his failure to recognize the manufactured code of rules. The violence that floats liks static electricty that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security; I'm attracted to living like that,' he wrote in [the third] piece, titled "Doing Time in a Disposable Body..." The concluding story here, "Spiral," is the last piece David ever wrote. Much of it is about AIDS, hospital visits to the latest dying friend, his reaction to some porn palace where no one's using a condom, and, at the end, a poetic evocation of fading away: "I am growing tired. I am waving to you from here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.'

Materials relating to Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, can be found in the Wojanrowicz collection at the Fales Library, Series III, Subseries A, Container 1, Box 4.

7 Miles a Second (1996)

Illustrated by James Romberger and colored by Marguerite Van Cook, Seven Miles a Second is a graphic novel that Wojnarowicz began in 1987, after Romberger and Van Cook closed Ground Zero Gallery. However, the work wasn't finished until 1996, long after Wojnarowicz's death, when it was published by DC/Vertigo. It was subsequently republished in 2013 by Fantagraphics.

Originally, 7 Miles a Second was a collaboration between Romberger and Wojnarowicz. The plan was for the book to tell Wojnarowicz's life story in four parts: his early hustling years in Manhattan, his teenage years on the street, his life as an artist and activist in 1987, and a concluding section meant to show a happy future moment. However, Wojnarowicz had a hard time plotting out the third part, and the fourth part was never written. After Wojnarowicz's death, his partner, Tom Rauffenbart gave Romberger diaries and other material from which to finish the work. Romberger, in turn, brought on Van Cook as the colorist.

Material relating to 7 Miles a Second can be found in the Wojanrowicz collection at the Fales Library, Series III, Subseries A, Container 1, Box 6.

In the Shadow of the American Dream (2000)

In the Shadow of the American Dream is a condensed and edited version of Wojnarowicz's journals, edited by Amy Scholder and published by Grove Press in 2000. The title is taken from an essay contained in Close to the Knives. It was subsequently re-released, in 2014, by Open Road Media, as part of a series of his books which included republished versions of Close to the Knives, The Waterfront Journals, and Memories that Smell Like Gasoline. Each of these new editions features a black and white self-portrait on the cover.

Sources

Carr, Cythnia Fire in the Belly, 2012