Natalie Arita

“Matter’s what matters,” writes Lesley Wheeler in the final stanza of Mycocosmic, her sixth poetry collection and finalist for the Dorset Prize. This sentiment spans the entire work. With earthy, graceful prose, Wheeler weaves nature-based imagery and metaphors to reckon with aspects of the human condition, such as death, desire, and motherhood. 

Wheeler chronicles her mother’s cancer with unflinching physicality and heart: the sores on her skin, her hands on hospital sheets, the nightgown she’s dressed in after passing. In “Extended Release,” the reader accesses the pain of the rotation of doctors and drugs, the cancer’s work of the body. Crucially, what brings Wheeler comfort is the thought of her mother in the afterlife, in a garden: “She might smile under palm fronds there, lit / by hibiscus, full-bellied and finally warm.” Wheeler tethers her mother’s happiness to her immersion in nature. She reminds us of the refuge waiting in sun and earth, its color and closeness. Death and its ravages don’t seem as dire in “Prescriptions” when Wheeler soothes that “the tender blades love you” and comforts you with “a remedy of peonies.” 

Sex and sexuality are also examined with nature as a lens. In “The Underside of Everything You’ve Loved,” Wheeler describes her infatuation with a woman she once shared a class with in searing detail: she notes “the glow of her skin” and “the dimples beside her spine.” Wheeler struggled and put aside this attraction in the past; she is now married to a man. But she wonders at the lost possibility and laments the fear that held her back. This is articulated through nature-based metaphors: “Maybe I would have walked across a forested border, / if I’d never met him, into another country,” and “What I regret / is turning my back on the torch song in the laurel / in panic so earsplitting it exiled me.” As Wheeler summons nature as a means of solace, she also uses it to capture distance and longing — the space between her life and its unexplored potential. This encourages us to ponder our own choices and foregone outcomes, the shapes we haven’t taken and what they could’ve looked like. 

Another facet of existence Wheeler explores through nature is menopause and aging. Through the collection, we are made privy to the myriad ways bodies change: they flower and burn, cool and decay. Wheeler also takes us into the maturing of her own body — her hysterectomy, the marked difference between her and her past self. Describing the surgery in “Oxidation Story,” Wheeler writes: “Does a doctor like to burn patients? / The body can’t remember. The body likes anger, / the livid exhilaration, not so much / the landscape after.” Here, Wheeler likens the body to a land torched and rendered barren, granting us a unique perspective of the process. Still, she finds a strength in this newness when considering her younger self: the body “feels sorry for the girl, with so / much to dread until chemistry releases her.” Wheeler lends beauty and nuance to a process often ridiculed and minimized; she sets it masterfully into terms we can understand and empathize with. 

As humanity entangles with nature, an “underpoem” — one continuous poem, running throughout the work as a line at the bottom of each page — supports the collection. As the fungi Wheeler describes engage with and sometimes aid humans, the underpoem acts in communication with the work above it, offering wisdom and meaningful commentary. Much of the underpoem consists of facts about the kinds of nature Wheeler has invoked throughout the collection — fungi, mycelium, hyphae — that illuminate its power and purpose. Under “Map Projections,” Wheeler writes: “Fungi pair with other creatures cell to cell to tendril.” This is a truth richly expanded on later, when under “Particle-Wave” and “Eighteen” Wheeler says this: “My branching I are of my mother, her cells survive in me although, like ghosts, they’re too small to see.” In the underpoem, Wheeler demonstrates how the systems that make nature connect to the systems that make humanity; she points us to the magic and import we can draw from considering the living things that exist underneath, around, and within us. 

Mycocosmic calls on nature — its plants and microorganisms, the growth that both hides underground and flowers around us — to make sense of and add beauty to human experiences, many of which often feel senseless and incomprehensible. Wheeler reminds us to venture deeper, to break ground and search earth and become a part of something bigger. In doing this, she relays, we may reach our chance for peace, togetherness, and acceptance.