OPEN BOOKS IN WAYS OF WATER
Punctum Books
2023
In Open Book in Ways of Water, poet and artist Adam Wolfond explores the synaesthetic quality of autistic perception, the way in which water in its different materializations shapes and channels language. Building on notions such as “wetness,” “streams,” and “currents,” Wolfond constructs a linguistic universe in which writing and perception merge, move, and “pace to gether” – echoing both the togetherness of the senses and the gathering rhythms of water. Open Book in Ways of Water is as much a book of poetry and a book about poetry, a self-reflection in an endlessly moving and transforming element.
As the author himself explains:
Language is a way to understand each other but it is also reductive in the ways that it is abstracted and non-sensuous, and open writing as movement tends to be ignored as autistics are forced into neurotypical ways of seeing, and the thinking around artistic practices feels of a pace that intensifies the use of forms forming, and similarities with open processes are languaging the way of water, making language about artful relations with the more than human.
Water is a game of ways and patterns that wave and ripple and can pull us under, the talk is about surfacing but languaging is about feeling, moving the ways that it makes are having variances moving the thresholds in thinking feeling of a rally that comes from cutting the grammars out and that is the way of perception that is cut by grammar and people need art to dance this dance of relation.
A man of autism answers the ways of the body much of the time and that means my body rallies the artful atmospheres that are dancing me and the real feeling can dance the atmospheres as my body presence and pace shifts other bodies to be free. Having a ticcing body is making the dance about disorder but really it is about a different and diverse way of languaging with many feelings and bathing and immersing and I don’t have any other way.
THE WANTING WAY
Milkweed Editions
2022
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.
paperback / 184 pages / $16
EXTRACTS
REVIEWS
PRAISE
“The second book in Multiverse, a series written by the neurodivergent Wolfond, probes the relationships between humanity and nature.”— Publishers Weekly
“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
“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
In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What is Autism
Unrestricted Interest
2019
Welcome to the lived experience of the masterful ticcer, he who games space where the walls are never still. He finds kindred movement in water, which like these poems is forever eager, questioning new paths forward in a dance of tall ideas. Forwards, outwards, inwards: these poems think by moving and move by thinking. They are an invitation to be and be with.
Like water I am eager
Like water I am thinking
Like water I always move
paper chapbook / 43 pages / $12
There is Too Music in My Ears
Unrestricted Interest
2019
paper chapbook / $12
QUOTED
Languaging Body by Field Ecoproprioception by George Quasha
“Much of what Wolfond says applies to intimate human experience more generally, the mostly undisclosed part, witnessed as if in slow motion through cracks in the ordinary, or an infrascopic perspective. A close-up viewing of neurodivergence in its creative manifestation is an invitation to discover unexposed dimensions that are mostly submerged within neurotypicality.
It can reveal how any high degree of singular and embodied language realization exposes the intrinsic diversity of experience awake to its qualities - what our neurotypicality typically fails to appreciate. Wolfond’s written poetry invites serious study, and could be related, for instance, to the work of a major poet or recent time, Larry Eigner (1927 - 1996), a contemporary of Olson influenced by his poetics ‘composition by field’ (Projective Verse, 1950)