My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire is an orphanage for the unruly, lawless short pieces of Johanna Hedva's oracular practice. Published between 2012 and 2026—in places such as e-flux, frieze, Tate, MASS MoCA, and the Seoul Mediacity Biennial—these works keep their cloven feet in many different worlds, spanning essays, fiction, spells, fables, devotionals, séances, and as apparitions of Hedva's sculptures and installations.

Across years marked by illness, acclaim, and apocalypse, Hedva arrives as a fortuneteller at the end of the world. On these pages, sculptures drip and drain, and a knife impales the wall of a museum. Hair floats in bowls of honey, while quantum mechanics bloom in the mouth of a ghost. Cockroaches inherit their duties from dead mothers. Simone Weil, Odetta, Kim Eon Hee, and Clarice Lispector drift through as psychopomps.

One of our most accomplished smugglers between worlds and genres, Hedva offers a cosmological field guide to contemporary ruin and enchantment.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives between LA and New York. Hedva's practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition.

Hedva is the author of four books, most recently the 2024 essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh award for LGBTQ Social Justice writing. They are the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a "hellraising, resplendent must read," and On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper's favorites of 2018. They are also the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, which collects a decade of work in poetry, plays, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been exhibited internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon.

"I giggled and got scared. Whortleberry Switchblade. To quote the late, great Goddess Bunny, 'She had a certain sense of desperality.' Thus does the grimoire shake." — Ron Athey

"Hedva's latest is prophetic, hallucinatory, gorgeous, and biting. I lost count of how many lines I wanted to whisper out like hexes. When this finds you, you should know: it was meant for you to read." — Arabelle Sicardi, author of The House of Beauty

"How should an artist be in a time of collapse? Johanna Hedva's exceedingly charming and genre-bending collection presents the particular genius and lifestyle of living at the margins of our late capitalist meat grinder, and casts, through a spell, dignity and charisma and grace onto those who insist on making art, a spiritual calling for a material world in free fall. A contemporary fairy tale." — Geoffrey Mak, author of Mean Boys

"Johanna Hedva's My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire is many things—a grimoire, an eschatology, a deepening of already abyssal writing and art practice. But above all, it's an assertion of the care that can be found in despair and what lies on the other side—the full, blessed embodiment in a 'negation that is not nihilism but rather a kind of sacred annihilation.' This book scared and moved, enchanted and ensnared me; I am so grateful for it. It may be true, as Hedva writes, that we 'only know desire through its ruins,' but oh, look at what they offer here: What desire. What ruins." — Zefyr Lisowski, author of Uncanny Valley Girls and Lambda Literary Award winner

"This book is a living, breathing thing—in pain, in joy, in all the mess of the body in ruin, in desire, in complicity, in comfort, in chaos, ritual, rage, crisis, care. What I mean is: have I ever read a book this embodied? Here Johanna Hedva refuses the containment of form, of indifference, of doom, of technological capture, shifting the shape of the book in search of what exists beyond the answerable, a pulse in and out of meaning, feeling, dreaming, gasping, grasping. When Hedva writes, 'The voice is the most embodied document I can think of,' you know the voice is in this book—shivering, quivering, all the ripples of sensation and breath." — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl

"Hedva's textural juxtapositions are perhaps the most jarring and exciting thing about My Knife Collection. They reveal to us the similarities between technology and spirituality, and nature and fantasy. 'What is the opposite of an epiphany?' This book seeks to answer this question. Hedva roots us in the slow pain of the inevitable, the feeling that the future has been here all along, yelling in our faces. The creeping loneliness of mechanical friends and consternations concerning today's apocalypse is filtered through the unending pursuit of love. Hedva does not seek to alienate; instead, they stroke our disgusting miseries with the firm hand of a gentle domme." — Nazareth Hassan, Pulitzer Prize finalist

"There's no one I'd rather read than Johanna Hedva. Their visionary work opens up spaces of revelation, with sentences that sing, snarl, and sizzle. In seeking ways to express states that elude definition or legibility—sickness, fantasy, obsession, immersion in music or ritual—Hedva leads us, brilliantly, to 'a world where a language made of words can't go.'" — Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

"Like a series of delicious little stabs between the ribs from a shiv carved out of some kind of precious stone: acute, invigorating, fierce, perversely hot, and all-around spooky. I adore how mad, how wild, this book is. It's smart, yes; it also smarts." — Philippa Snow, author of It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame

"'Wielding a knife feels great,' Hedva writes. If fate = desire (a given) and knife = language (my proposal), then in this
text, Hedva wields language with a gleeful, oracular, thaumaturgical power. These collected writings overflow with wit, death, sex, and all the other usual spell matter (blood, guts, hair, candles). Enjoy the ride. Hedva is a fortuneteller for our end-of-time-times." — Larissa Pham, author of Discipline, a novel, and Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy

"What can a knife collection do? Cut into flesh, enliven drunken games, defend from attack, castrate an enemy, tend a garden, aid ritual and ceremony; Hedva's writing here is, as always, full of passion, audacity, kink, humiliation, and courage." — P. Staff