Just below our feet, billions of whisper-thin hyphae combine to form mycelium, the filaments of which fungi are composed. Bereft of, say, a nice risotto, we might easily forget these vital communities of decomposers, but as several recent works on the magic of mycology have reminded us, fungi are healers, builders, and vehicles for the imagination. To the metaphorically-minded, fungal networks also hold resonant symbolic power, and invoke questions about identity and community. What might it be like, for example, to possess a multi-bodied consciousness? To exist in mutual reciprocity–not only with members of one’s immediate species, but with an entire ecosystem?
These questions drive the inventive craft in Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic (Tupelo Press, 2025), a verse exploration of both fungi and self as network. In Wheeler’s poetic imagination, networks are familial, historical, emotional; even divinatory. Her book begins and ends with a series of poems about the speaker’s relationship with their mother, and is interwoven with narratives of kinship, parenthood, language, and the desire to imagine oneself–often through the form of magical projection, divination, or bibliomancy–into an uncertain, sometimes-feared future. Wheeler’s text has an argument: like fungi, we are all connected, inextricable from our experiences of each other. Yet its poems also practice curiosity, posing questions about the nature of our connectedness and, of course, the delightfully rich and loamy language of our literal underworld.
Wheeler directly addresses our fungal selfhoods in poems such as “Dark Energy,” in which she writes, “we are many– / stranded and one-bodied, / “the ten-thousand sexes of our fungal computer penetrating / rock & plant & cloud & animal or / becoming indistinguishable from / what was called individual.” While a selection of the poems are lyrics and are spoken from a first-person perspective, the numinousness of “we” emerges in poems such as “Dark Energy” and the opening invocation, “We Could Be,” to remind us that we are always in a collective realm. Elsewhere in Wheeler’s collection, narratives of interconnectedness are more personal, more familial. In “Gran Torino Gigan,” for example, a family cuddles together in the “rhizomatic zigzags” of sleeping bags in the back of a family car; likewise, in the moving “Map Projections,” Wheeler re-examines a history of familial abuse by splicing together two distinct narrative experiences, proving the penumbra greater than the single voice.
Although Mycocosmic is formally varied, a handful of its poems can be classified as sonnets, adding a formal dimension to Wheeler’s exploration of the physical and psychological transformations made possible in the text’s underworlds. Wheeler’s opening sonnet, “We Could Be,” reads as a kind of across-the-fourth-wall proposal for beauty and meaning via mycological multiplicity. “Our mistakes,” the speaker offers, “[could be] gorgeous in dispersal / across polluted skies. Help me try.” Later, there is “Garden State,” a coming-of-age sonnet about the realization of the self as beautiful, and the ways in which families create hierarchies between siblings. In “Unsonnet,” Wheeler’s speaker turns against optimism, asking for fog to “roll back over / my life”; though there would be “no spring,” there would also be “no grief.” Several other poems appear to function, officially or unofficially, as “unsonnets” or ‘near-sonnets,’ considering and frequently withholding the transformation of self and belief the sonnet, as a form, promises. There is volta-like metamorphosis in Wheeler’s text, both of self and other; beauty is born, witnessed, and, in some instances, refused. Yet one gets the sense that we are operating in ‘mycology’ logic here–the familiar form is invoked but sometimes deliberately left unfinished, unresolved. The individual component here is, after all, less crucial than the network or the whole.
In another manifestation of its clear interest in mushroom-as-metaphor, Mycocosmic also engages a consistent thematic meditation on death, divination, and the afterlife. Many of its arresting moments arrive in the text’s latter half in a series of poems about–and presumably generated through–bibliomancy. In “Counterphobic,” Wheeler conjures defixiones–leaden Latin curse tablets–and considers whether “words / are amulets,” perhaps “sealed with the address of supernatural power / or the restless dead.” Soon follow “For Evaporation of Hope, With Bibliomancy” and “It Is Advantageous to Place on the Table a [Hollow Figurine] of Apollo, With Bibliomancy,” both centered around a speaker who engages text and object as amulets with the power to ward off loneliness, betrayal, and isolation. If fungi do the literal work of decomposing our dead, Wheeler seems to suggest, words do the emotional and literary work of decomposition, transmigration, and, as Wheeler asserts in “For Metamorphosis, With Bibliomancy,” “transmutation.” It is in language that we articulate our own awareness of our mortality–as indicated in the powerful “First in Line for Takeoff”–and also that we search, whether in the form of horoscopes, tarot cards, amulets, almanacs, and invocations–for a sense of wait awaits us in our own transformative moments.
The poems in Mycocosmic are doubled, fittingly, by a “shadow self”–or, maybe more to the point, a ‘fungal self’–in the form of a long cento in the footnotes, occupying space on each page. The footnote poem is both ‘beneath’ and ‘within.’ Set in a different typeface, relegated to the footer, and frequently composed of language more empirical in nature than the rich emotional landscape of the sonnets and lyrics with which they exist in uncertain relation, the cento and main text engage in a symbiotic relationship. If the poems are surface substrate, the cento operates as a subterranean mycelium. Wheeler’s inventive use of the footnote format evokes recent works in poetic footnotes (such as Brian Treare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven) and similarly asks questions about what we value and center, and what we relegate to the margins. Mushrooms might be just under the surface, but their message is as significant as what we see above.
Wheeler’s ‘underground cento’ functions as the text’s subconscious, evoking most directly some of the text’s broader thematic, environmental, and ecological applications. Many of the cento’s lines are drawn from recent works on underground ecosystems and landscapes, such as Robert MacFarlane’s Underland and Anna L. Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. Others come from works on ecology, language, and reciprocity, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The individual subconscious (also, of course, an underworld!) gets its due in the form of a line drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome, Revisited: An Interpretive Walk through The Interpretation of Dreams.” Read in conjunction with the individual poems or as a long poem in its own right, the cento makes what might be termed Wheeler’s thesis evident–the richness of fungi has applications everywhere, and offers a metaphor for connectedness evoked in the poems’ personal narratives and in a host of other, multi-disciplinary works besides.
While reading and considering Mycocosmic, one gets a renewed sense of what Whitman, Kimmerer, and the fungi have known for ages past–we are always multiple. Sometimes–as in “The Underside of Everything You’ve Loved,” “Doubled, Briefly,” and “Eighteen,” we are, as parents, children, or lovers, momentarily two. At other times, as in “Deferred,” we are inseparable from both the memories that bind us to place and the knowledge of the limitations and harms the places we inhabit inflict upon others. We are frequently–as in “Mail Order LaCharta”–both alone and together in our experiences of loneliness. Wherever we are in our multiple selves, Wheeler reminds us, we are moving over and in the way of the fungi. “I never thought a circuit / would loop through me,” the speaker in the final poem, “Return Path,” offers; “but... / I’ve found a way to pray. Through my feet, / I reach down. There’s something animate, / mycelial, that touches me back.” Reading Mycocosmic is an experience in remembering to reach down, and hoping to be touched back.