Mycocosmic by Lesley Wheeler

Mycocosmic

by Lesley Wheeler

$19.95

Without fungi and bacteria, death would overwhelm the planet. In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s latest poetry collection, incantatory poems summon transformation after the losses of midlife, including her mother’s death. Beneath them runs a book-length essay in verse inspired by mycelia, the fungal networks thriving beneath us, exploring how the processes of grief nourish new life. Wheeler invents a fungal poetics to metabolize secrets, grief, and anger so that life can begin anew.

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  • Description

  • Without fungi and bacteria, death would overwhelm the planet. In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s latest poetry collection, incantatory poems summon transformation after the losses of midlife, including her mother’s death. Beneath them runs a book-length essay in verse inspired by mycelia, the fungal networks thriving beneath us, exploring how the processes of grief nourish new life. Wheeler invents a fungal poetics to metabolize secrets, grief, and anger so that life can begin anew.

    Format: Paperback
    Published: March 2025
    ISBN: 978-1-961209-16-9

  • About The Author

  • Lesley Wheeler, poetry editor of Shenandoah, is the author of Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and poetry collections The State She’s In, Radioland, and Heterotopia. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and Ecotone, and her work has been supported by grants from Fulbright, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Conference.

  • Critics' Reviews

  • ‘People radiate light they cannot see,’ writes Lesley Wheeler in Mycocosmic, a brilliantly structured book that glimmers with tensions and betrayals, that blazes with gratitude and resilience. Wheeler’s language is alive on the page; it pulses with a perceptiveness that braids thought and sensation into imagery that startles, shines. The footnote-poem is striking—a lyrical summoning that enriches and complicates. Mycocosmic is a marvelous book that demands and rewards multiple readings.

    —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

    Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic is a hymn to our shiftiness and interconnection—the inevitable metamorphosis of corporeality and desire and memory. These exquisitely wrought, multivalent poems thrum through their bodies with “the persistent, mysterious, the hungry electrical process of love!” Using mycelium as an extended metaphor and underpoem girding the footers of Mycocosmic, Wheeler revels in and explicates the dark and dazzling energy of sex, death, motherhood, family, and the female body to create a new narrative of transformation.

    —Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk

    Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic embraces mushroom-as-metaphor in these wholly original, stunning poems. Fungi as food, as medicine (including psychedelics), as persistence, as underground webs of connection and resistance. These magic mushrooms of poetry sing of the body, the body politic, the terrors and pleasures of childhood and death. Employing sonnets and tarot cards, spirituality and science, Wheeler’s obsessions become the reader’s. Underneath each poem, lines from a cento are growing in an inventive form Wheeler makes entirely her own.

    —Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

  • Excerpts

  • No information is available.

  • Weight

  • 0.45 lbs

  • Dimensions

  • 6 × 9 in

  • Awards

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Without fungi and bacteria, death would overwhelm the planet. In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s latest poetry collection, incantatory poems summon transformation after the losses of midlife, including her mother’s death. Beneath them runs a book-length essay in verse inspired by mycelia, the fungal networks thriving beneath us, exploring how the processes of grief nourish new life. Wheeler invents a fungal poetics to metabolize secrets, grief, and anger so that life can begin anew.

Format: Paperback
Published: March 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961209-16-9

Lesley Wheeler, poetry editor of Shenandoah, is the author of Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and poetry collections The State She’s In, Radioland, and Heterotopia. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and Ecotone, and her work has been supported by grants from Fulbright, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Conference.

‘People radiate light they cannot see,’ writes Lesley Wheeler in Mycocosmic, a brilliantly structured book that glimmers with tensions and betrayals, that blazes with gratitude and resilience. Wheeler’s language is alive on the page; it pulses with a perceptiveness that braids thought and sensation into imagery that startles, shines. The footnote-poem is striking—a lyrical summoning that enriches and complicates. Mycocosmic is a marvelous book that demands and rewards multiple readings.

—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic is a hymn to our shiftiness and interconnection—the inevitable metamorphosis of corporeality and desire and memory. These exquisitely wrought, multivalent poems thrum through their bodies with “the persistent, mysterious, the hungry electrical process of love!” Using mycelium as an extended metaphor and underpoem girding the footers of Mycocosmic, Wheeler revels in and explicates the dark and dazzling energy of sex, death, motherhood, family, and the female body to create a new narrative of transformation.

—Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk

Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic embraces mushroom-as-metaphor in these wholly original, stunning poems. Fungi as food, as medicine (including psychedelics), as persistence, as underground webs of connection and resistance. These magic mushrooms of poetry sing of the body, the body politic, the terrors and pleasures of childhood and death. Employing sonnets and tarot cards, spirituality and science, Wheeler’s obsessions become the reader’s. Underneath each poem, lines from a cento are growing in an inventive form Wheeler makes entirely her own.

—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story
No information is available.
0.45 lbs
6 × 9 in
No Information