Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.
The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.
Reviews
Some of his most searing and explosive work—sketches, essays and livewire prose poems resulting from an embodied sense of longing and anger.
Nightboat Books is an extremely important publisher, and it crowdfunded the publication of this book by artist Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992. I can’t get enough of his work . . . I’m so glad that independent publishers are here to make sure Wojnarowicz’s work, which feels like it could’ve been written yesterday, is never forgotten.
[H]orny and freaky encounters of a very different time in downtown New York.
Wojnarowicz’s prose forms this light, these shards, that feeling of holding your breath . . . A fever dream.
The writing is hypnotic, colloquial, and often surprising—the first story, for instance, ends with the obliterative brightness of a policeman’s flashlight, the prose dissolving into short line segments, too.
To read the stories in David Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is to rush through the particularity of consciousness into the totality of being. His prose reshapes time through eddies and loops and, in turn, reshapes what narrative prose can be.
Wojnarowicz’s already impressive shadow seems to have grown longer over the past few years . . . It’s moving, if maddening, that we keep uncovering new gifts from a visionary whose life was cut short by a callow administration.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline encapsulates [David Wojnarowicz’s] rage and twists it with a disarming tenderness—the kind of magnanimous generosity and understanding I can only imagine comes from looking back at one’s own life from the deathbed.
Vital . . . Rarely has writing captured such precarious proximity to death.
Across his art and writings, Wojnarowicz touches a world he knows will break, a world he hopes to memorialize in words and images, to break and be broken with others . . [Memories] should be in every travel bag this summer—Wojnarowicz forever and ever.
He writes of his experiences of the unification of sex, violence, and pleasure in unflinching candidness . . . truthful and courageous.
Prepare for some of the most bracing work you’re likely to encounter.
Raw, tender, horrific, compassionate. Everything we have left of David Wojnarowicz is to be cherished.
-Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore
“Sick, like voiceover for dark version of My Own Private Idaho.”
-Charlie Fox
