Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic

 

Garden State

A man in a suit approached and touched my arm.
Would I pose in front of the merry-go-round?
I was thirteen, free for an hour in the middle
of Paramus Park Mall, in America. I was America.
The man was leading a tour; the tourists spoke
no English. My English mother said, Your sister
is beautiful, but you are reasonably attractive.
She chose my clothes, that day a blouse abuzz
with flowers, a pink pleated skirt. Yes, I said,
and sat on the bench. Everybody smiled. My hair
curled like orchid petals. A carousel horse whispered,
Why would they point their cameras at you?
As if you were pretty. This will be a story, I replied.
Of cold glass eyes that saw the bloom in me.

The sixth full-length poetry title by Lexington, Virginia poet Lesley Wheeler, and the first I’ve seen, is Mycocosmic (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2025), a collection that, at least on the surface, echoes Toronto poet Jay MillAr’s second full-length collection, Mycological Studies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002) or the more recent full-length debut by Queens, New York-based poet Amanda Monti, Mycelial Person (Milwaukee WI: Vegetarian Alcoholic Poetry, 2021) [see my review of such here] for their book-length lyric focus on and around the mushroom. Whereas MillAr’s poems emerged out of direct field work, akin to Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior [see my review of the more recent reissue of Niedecker’s poem here], and Monti approached the physical interlay of mushroom interconnectivity through the long poem, Wheeler embraces the mushroom-as-metaphor, offering an underlay of strands that connect together her compact first-person lyrics. Wheeler writes of family stories, motherhood, the female body, agency and childhood through first-person observations, seeking clarification through the minutae of all that connects, including to her and her immediate landscape. “Meanwhile my sister,” she offers, as part of the extended sequence “Map Projections,” “marooned. // It’s as vivid to me as a history book.”

As well, Wheeler offers a textual underlay, a separate thread of lyric that runs across the bottom of each page, connecting and wrapping through and across the collection as a whole, reminiscent of how Darren Wershler (then Darren Wershler-Henry) ran a similar thread across his own second collection, the tapeworm foundry, or the dangerous prevalence of imagination (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000) (I’m sure there are other examples as well). Wheeler plays her thread as a secondary but interconnected narrative, rolling and strolling across “Some commensal decomposers are infamous for other / kinds of magic / spirit-work: soothing wrath & grief in humans, disintegrating toxic feelings. / Researchers describe movement of feelings from separateness to / interconnectedness… / catharsis…forgiveness.”

“People radiate light they cannot see.” Wheeler writes, to open the poem “Particle-Wave,” “The subatomic universe blazes with chances.” Across a sequence of finely-honed lyrics, Wheeler writes of what connects and what falls free, of what holds together and what isn’t possible.