Forest Euphoria
The Abounding Queerness of Nature
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * VANITY FAIR BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * TIME 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2025
“An antidote to the loneliness of our species.”—ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
“A master class in how to love the world.”—MARGARET RENKL
A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.
Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.
Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kaishian, a mycology curator at the New York State Museum, debuts with reverent celebration of the natural world's diversity. Highlighting "queer" animals, fungi, and plants that complicate "our ideas of what is ‘normal' versus what is ‘deviant,' " Kaishian contends that cassowaries, a type of flightless bird, upend sexual binaries because both males and females have phalluses. She explains that eels are intersex until their final year of life, when they "stop eating and structurally repurpose their digestive organs" into testes and ovaries, and that all slipper snails start out as males until one day they pile on top of one another, at which point some switch sexes depending on their position in the mound. Elsewhere, Kaishian reflects on how nature has informed her understanding of her own queerness. For instance, she describes how she was initially drawn to study fungi because she saw the ambiguity of her gender identity reflected in the numerous mating types found in most species (the Schizophyllum commune has more than 23,000 "sexes"). Fascinating tidbits abound, and the lyrical prose imbues the scientific discussions with a sense of wonder (she describes how each spring in forests east of the Mississippi River, "the understory fills with sweet lures—trillium, violets, mayflower, bloodroot—love potions for pollinators, themselves shuddering into awareness"). This will leave readers in awe of nature's many splendors.
