We’re thrilled to congratulate longtime Cimarron contributor Lesley Wheeler on her poetry collection, Mycocosmic, out this Friday from Tupelo Press. Click here to order a copy!

Her poem, “Counterphobic,” first appeared in Issue 219/220 of Cimarron and is included in Lesley’s latest collection.

Without fungi and bacteria, death would overwhelm the planet. In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s latest poetry collection, incantatory poems summon transformation after the losses of midlife, including her mother’s death. Beneath them runs a book-length essay in verse inspired by mycelia, the fungal networks thriving beneath us, exploring how the processes of grief nourish new life. Wheeler invents a fungal poetics to metabolize secrets, grief, and anger so that life can begin anew.

‘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, poetry editor of Shenandoah, is the author of Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and poetry collections The State She’s In, Radioland, and Heterotopia. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Cimarron Review, and Ecotone, and her work has been supported by grants from Fulbright, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Conference.