A literary series dedicated to different ways of languaging
Multiverse
About the series
Multiverse is a literary series devoted to different ways of languaging, curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin, and featuring a chorus of editorial voices. Multiverse primarily emerges from the practices and creativity of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled cultures. The desire of Multiverse is to serially surface multiple universes of underheard language that might intersect, resonate, and aggregate toward liberatory futures. In other words, each book in the Multiverse series gestures toward a correspondence—human and more-than-human—that lovingly exceeds what is normal and normative in our society, questioning and augmenting what literary culture is, has been, and can be.
Praise for the series
“When neurodivergent poets eschew the conventions of neuronormative writing and instead take the liberty of creating whatever neuroqueer languagings most effectively express their own lived realities, their words can act upon the reader like mind-expanding drugs. By providing a venue for such work, Multiverse is in the business not merely of publishing books, but also of unveiling hidden potentials of human consciousness.”
—Nick Walker, neurodiversity scholar, co-founder of Autonomous Press, psychology professor at California Institute of Integral Studies
“Queer poet Allen Ginsberg once wrote, ‘The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.’ The ambitious mission of Milkweed’s Multiverse series is to do precisely that by highlighting not just new and innovative kinds of writing, but ways of being in the world that have traditionally been exiled to the margins of human experience by the gatekeepers of the canon. To immerse yourself in the lively, passionate, fresh and always surprising voices of Multiverse is to restore your faith in the redemptive potential of language itself.”
—Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen.
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.”
A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom.
The newest entry in the Multiverse series Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.
An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.
A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.
