The Waterfront Journals

by David Wojnarowicz

Book Overview

David Wojnarowicz came to fame in the 1980s as a radical artist whose work challenged the boundaries of art, making him, for a time, the object of Jesse Helms's conservative backlash. Before his death in 1992, he was established as an outspoken AIDS activist, anticensorship advocate, and groundbreaking artist and writer. New York called him a "spokesman for the unspeakable," and The New York Times declared that "his most lasting legacy will be...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802135048
• ISBN13: 9780802135049
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 127 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

shocking, moving, very very good

This collection of stories is unlike any other that i've read. The journals are incredibly moving evoking a range of emotions at once. Some make you cringe, others make you want to cry and there's one or two that'll make you smile and give you hope for humanity. Graphic so not for everyone but definitely recommended.

raw and riveting

David Wojnarowicz's brief monologues from the street may indeed be somewhat romantic, as one reviewer put it, but they are also raw and riveting because they give readers a glimpse, albeit from Wojnarowizc's perspective, of the dark, rich underside or "other"-side of dominant American life. The monologues describe worlds that only suggest themselves occasionally to most of us, perhaps in the face of a homeless person or a panhandler or a tranny hustler. We tend to forget or blind ourselves to these compelling lives because they may seem so "abnormal" or so "disgusting," especially if they appear to be "chosen" lives, which some are, not just the lives of those who are desperate or despairing or impoverished or mentally ill. Whether the lives are of the latter kind or the former, we need to remember to embrace them as a part of the continuum of all American life, and Wojnarowicz helps us to do that with insight and compassion.