(Re)Negotiating the world. Autistic being in the world in Nathalie Ruejas Jonson’s Låtsasheten Och Hannah Emerson’s You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode

Swedish author and artist Nathalie Ruejas Jonson’s Låtsasheten (2017) is a picture book for children and adults, described by Gunilla Brodrej as ‘an unusual picture book about a perhaps unusual situation, written by an artist with autism, whose first language is pictures. I don’t really understand it, but for the right reader this is an important alternative description of reality’ (Expressen, 30.10.2017). American Hannah Emerson’s poetry suite You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode (2020) is likewise written by a poet who is openly autistic and partially non-verbal. These two books depict an autistic experience of the world. This article reads Ruejas Jonson’s picture book through Emerson’s poetry, from an autistic perspective, not as an ‘alternative account of reality’ but as autistic ways of approaching the world, as the primary way of doing so. From a neurodiversity perspective as well as the autistic poetics that Julia Miele Rodas begins in Autistic Disturbances. Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (2018), I examine Ruejas Jonson’s picture book practice and Emerson’s poetry, focusing on how an autistic experience of language has a strong poetic potential.