Since its inception in 1980, Milkweed Editions has built an engaged community around “transformative” literature. But in an age where...
The Wanting Way
In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the choreography.”
In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. And as each path elaborates itself, Wolfond’s guiding hand seems always to stay held out to the reader, inviting them further into a shared and unprecedented unfolding.
The Wanting Way is actually a confluence of diverse ways—rallies, paths, waves, jams, streams, desire lines—that converge wherever the dry verbiage of the talking world requires hydration. Each poem is an invitation to bathe in the play of languaging. And each poem is an invitation to a dance that’s already happening, called into motion by the objects and atmospheres of a more-than-human world. Wolfond makes space for new poetics, new choreographies, and new possibilities toward forging a consensual—felt and feeling—world where we might find free disassembly and assembly together.
There is a neurodivergent universe within this one, and Wolfond’s poems continuously pull back the unnecessary veil between human and nature.
LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK:
Keywords:
Toronto; water; autism; neurodiversity; neurodivergent; disability; ecology; architexture; relation; nonspeaking
ISBN:
9781571315502 Publish Date:
11/08/2022
Pages:
184
Size:
9 × 6 × 0.25 in
Weight:
10.2 oz
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Praise and Prizes
“As a nonspeaking autistic artist, prose writer and poet, Wolfond uses language as an invitation to witness and engage where evanescence arises from multiplicity, not uniformity and convention.”
Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine
“Resonant across these exquisite poems is a wanting that moves across a ‘talking without words,’ ‘because the body is a wanting thing pacing the environment.’ Wanting, 111 times, carried by and in the world, a movement not strictly voluntary but fiercely relational, a want not for ‘me,’ not for all ‘I’ can do, but for the facilitation of a languaging in assembly, a languaging wildly neurodiverse in its ‘talking feeling and seeing.’ The wanting question in The Wanting Way pulses across this collection, cutting as it traces new ways of moving in the living.”
Erin Manning
“Wolfond’s poems masterfully extend the choreography to include many kinds of thought-motion, inviting the reader to move with and through navigations of language, time, and space. With surprising syntax that spurs surprising thought, language drifts and reforms like the water that runs through so many of Wolfond’s poems, as the non-talking speaker is continuously planting, growing, and consuming language. . . . Wolfond’s poems remind me that even for ‘the open / thinker who / feels too much,’ uncontainment, or porousness, can also be expansive—throwing open the door to tall ideas, to expert movement, to watering thoughts like rain.”
Lauren Russell
“The second book in Multiverse, a series written by the neurodivergent Wolfond, probes the relationships between humanity and nature.”
Publishers Weekly
“Wolfond’s poems are tender-hearted evocations… he has demonstrated that all language, and all true poetry, is an invisible architecture within which we can all conduct our lives with a quiet grace and a humble charm.”
Donald Brackett, Critics at Large
"[In The Wanting Way] the poet is communicating bidirectionally and multidirectionality. In these ways, Wolfond’s apparently sought-after relationship with his eager readers makes for a mingling of both his own reflections and what might be bestowed to and shared with us through his musics and often whimsical while serious counsel."
Diane R. Wiener, Wordgathering
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