Multiverse (Milkweed Editions)

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.

A raw, sweeping debut collection that interrogates the limits of the human animal and confronts the boundary between fear and freedom. The startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. Willful misspellings and created constructions open language up to play, with phrases existing somewhere between English and Swedish to de-pathologize speech and thought. This fairy-tale treatise on otherness interweaves Nygren's own inimitable illustrations to visualize the idea that writing can be closer to a drawing of words than speaking. "We know yet nothing," they write. "We whisper it in the night / We are the pride glittering." Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book's three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker's orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming. Wholly unique, a being all its own, blush / river / fox paws on the door of our eye, our heart, our ear: "LET ME IN / the Fox whispers."