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.

Adam Wolfond's profile page

Adam Wolfond is the author of The Wanting Way. He is a nonspeaking autistic artist, poet, and university lecturer whose work has been featured in multimedia exhibitions, documentary films, academic journals, and philosophical treatises. He is the youngest writer to appear in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” series and is the author of two chapbooks, There Is Too Music in My Ears and In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What Is Autism, both published by Unrestricted Editions. He is also a founding member of dis assembly, a neurodiverse artist collective based in Toronto.

Praise for 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.”—Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine

“The second book in Multiverse, a series written by the neurodivergent Wolfond, probes the relationships between humanity and nature.”—Publishers Weekly

"[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

“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

“Adam Wolfond’s astonishing work maps and annotates the interior spaces in lyric intensity. In poems that glide, posit, and sing, we hear how the body, attuned to ‘the trees . . . languaging,’ constructs art. It is here where we are taught to understand multiple knowledges and registers in the choir of what’s possible. These are extraordinary poems.”—Oliver de la Paz

“way making, way finding – when thinking and feeling alongside Wolfond’s poems, the verbs approach holding hands – ‘bathing talking feeling / and seeing that immerses / everything’ – to be avowedly from and for ‘autistic greatness’ – to be given in trust to ‘the important copilots in the / atmosphere of moving things’ – which is to say – to be given in an invitation to yes – where yes ‘is always with love / and not the way of force’ – an invitation ‘to question the consent / and not the disabled person’ – is an invitation, also, for every type of mind to abandon its type –”—Farid Matuk

“Through words full of musicality Adam advocates for his right to be himself, demanding that his very way of existing in the world be respected. The comparisons, analogies, and metaphors in his poems give us a colorful imagery of a body in constant movement, the synesthetic experience of a mind full of colorful sounds and feelings. Adam invites ‘talkers’ to quietly listen to his nonspeaking language, telling us of a direct line between his brain and his body, his body and his language. By wanting to really want to listen, we can learn the language of his movements.”— Amy Sequenzia

“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

Praise for Adam Wolfond

“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