Mycocosmic - by Lesley Wheeler (Paperback)

About the Book

"Good things come to you through fire," a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with one loss after another? Then she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until activated by fire. Enter mycelia and a teeming underground world that metabolizes death, changing what remains so that life can begin anew. Mycocosmic offers intricately woven spell poems -- prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations -- that call for transformation. A parent's death gives Wheeler the freedom to reveal difficult truths about family violence and her sexuality; a midlife mental health crisis transforms her sense of self. Incantatory language channeled through a wide variety of forms -- including free verse, litany, sonnets, the bref double, the golden shovel, and the villanelle -- empowers these shifts. Beneath these poems runs a book-length essay in verse, "Underpoem [Fire Fungus]," sending tendrils across the footer of each page. This poetic mycelium nourishes metamorphosis and highlights its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, "Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency." Poetry is rooted in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic demonstrates how interdependence binds us together.

Book Synopsis

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven incantations--prayers, hexes, and charms--all of which call for a transformation of language, grief, and the self.

"Good things come to you through fire," a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with one loss after another? Then she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until activated by fire. Enter mycelia and a teeming underground world that metabolizes death, changing what remains so that life can begin anew.

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven spell poems--prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations--that call for transformation. A parent's death gives Wheeler the freedom to reveal difficult truths about family violence and her sexuality; a midlife mental health crisis transforms her sense of self. Incantatory language channeled through a wide variety of forms--including free verse, litany, sonnets, the bref double, the golden shovel, and the villanelle--empowers these shifts.

Beneath these poems runs a book-length essay in verse, "Underpoem [Fire Fungus]," sending tendrils across the footer of each page. This poetic mycelium nourishes metamorphosis and highlights its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, "Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency." Poetry is rooted in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic demonstrates how interdependence binds us together.

Review Quotes

"Mycocosmic is well-crafted and its speaker guides readers to greater insights."-- "Midwest Book Review"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"These poems showcase Lesley Wheeler's acerbic wit and vast intelligence- all laced over with a compassionate spirit for what divides us and what makes us whole."-- "Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Bite by Bite"

"Wheeler's research, her feral witchery, her poems themselves, are an answer, if not the antidote, to the state we're in."-- "Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry"

About the Author

Lesley Wheeler is the author of five previous poetry collections, including The State She's In and Heterotopia. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry's Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Her work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop, and her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, Ecotone, and other magazines. She is the poetry editor of Shenandoah.