Mycocosmic

‘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