Mycocosmic

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.