I am beginning to love the way mycologists view the world—there is a particular exuberance, I believe, that comes along with understanding just how interconnected the world is. Kaishian’s brilliant Forest Euphoria finds joy down in the soil with mushrooms, snails, cicadas, and snakes; it revels in the air with crows; it glides through water with eels. As she celebrates the inherent queerness of the life around us—and how it helped her find herself—Kaishian rejects dominant categorizations and binaries and reveals our world in technicolor—richer and more magical and deeply connected than any science textbook would have you believe. With a lyrical, reverent tone, the writer implores us to look deeper and keep our minds open, to learn from the life around us to value and love all beings.
Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, (List Price: $30, Spiegel & Grau, 9781954118904, May 2025)
Reviewed by Hannah DeCamp, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia