The Wanting Way

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”