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The Wanting Way: Poems
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.
- GenresPoetry
184 pages, Paperback
Published November 8, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 22, 2022
[Thank you Milkweed Books for a gifted copy, out Nov 8 🤍]
Adam Wolfond’s THE WANTING WAY is the second book in Multiverse, a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent, and I’ve been awaiting its arrival ever since reading the first (Hannah Emerson’s THE KISSING OF KISSING).
“I must follow the thread to the end I ask others to unravel with me,” Wolfond writes, and this is how we begin THE WANTING WAY, with an invitation: we are invited to experience language and body as he experiences it (with a rhythm “long and continuous…forging want of the howling wind”), to start in the middle or the end or to flip back and forth and back again, to taste words, to feel through the world, to unravel new poems from words tangled in a blue thread that weaves through the entire book.
Reading these poems, I feel inevitably drawn to Wolfond’s way of touching the world—the wanting way—through taps, tics, stims, sticks (and, here, touching is also a way of requesting how to be touched, it is asking us to ask for consent). Words are tactile; they slip and scatter fluid on the page and portray a body that it feels movement more intensely, that choreographs patterns and motions that neurotypical people often misunderstand. Wolfond is nonspeaking and autistic, and the speaking are, for once, silent as his words move through our brain. Here, his language moves at its own pace, not one set by others. Here, he moves in the way he wants to move or that his body asks to move (”I language the way I move”). Here, “the body is a wanting thing”: demanding, different, and human. It dances its own dance freely and asks us to say yes to it.
Adam Wolfond’s THE WANTING WAY is the second book in Multiverse, a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent, and I’ve been awaiting its arrival ever since reading the first (Hannah Emerson’s THE KISSING OF KISSING).
“I must follow the thread to the end I ask others to unravel with me,” Wolfond writes, and this is how we begin THE WANTING WAY, with an invitation: we are invited to experience language and body as he experiences it (with a rhythm “long and continuous…forging want of the howling wind”), to start in the middle or the end or to flip back and forth and back again, to taste words, to feel through the world, to unravel new poems from words tangled in a blue thread that weaves through the entire book.
Reading these poems, I feel inevitably drawn to Wolfond’s way of touching the world—the wanting way—through taps, tics, stims, sticks (and, here, touching is also a way of requesting how to be touched, it is asking us to ask for consent). Words are tactile; they slip and scatter fluid on the page and portray a body that it feels movement more intensely, that choreographs patterns and motions that neurotypical people often misunderstand. Wolfond is nonspeaking and autistic, and the speaking are, for once, silent as his words move through our brain. Here, his language moves at its own pace, not one set by others. Here, he moves in the way he wants to move or that his body asks to move (”I language the way I move”). Here, “the body is a wanting thing”: demanding, different, and human. It dances its own dance freely and asks us to say yes to it.
April 5, 2024
One of my favorite parts about reading poetry is the way it allows readers to glimpse into the mind of the author and better understand their internal dialogue. In Adam Wolfond’s The Wanting Way, he writes in a very unconventional form of “languaging” as we know it to give authors a way to understand how his mind thinks and processes words. Adam also focuses on bringing a better understanding to the reader of how neurodiverse minds interact with language. Reading Adam’s poems really feels like you are taking a journey through his mind in the most beautiful way possible.
“I want to write the book / in the always air of thinking / and I am questioning trying / as a writer of an easy talker. / Yes I want to write asking talkers / to want the reading of my way / to watch the language other / than talking words and the way / the language thinks outside them”
“Yes the way I sway the awesome / rally is pandering the same language / but I dance it differently. I think that / I am answering in my movement I am / awkward but I can dance a lot / of thoughts at the same time.”
“I want to write the book / in the always air of thinking / and I am questioning trying / as a writer of an easy talker. / Yes I want to write asking talkers / to want the reading of my way / to watch the language other / than talking words and the way / the language thinks outside them”
“Yes the way I sway the awesome / rally is pandering the same language / but I dance it differently. I think that / I am answering in my movement I am / awkward but I can dance a lot / of thoughts at the same time.”
February 11, 2024
It definitely wasn't my favorite, I see what the author is trying to do with language but it just wasn't my style.
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March 22, 2025i think he did a great job because reading this was so effectively close to feeling nonverbal and overstimulated that i wanted to cry the whole time
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August 11, 2025I had to read this for a class
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews