Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954118904
Publisher:	Spiegel & Grau
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the curator of mycology at the New York State Museum, as well as faculty with the Bard Prison Initiative. Kaishian earned her PhD from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Table of Contents

Interspecies Dens
Slugs, Snails, and Other Ways of Being
Swamp Creatures
Fungal Personhood
Cemetery Crows
Purple Love
Community Time
The Magnetism of Eels

Spring Ephemerals: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Epilogue: Forest Euphoria

Editorial Reviews

03/03/2025

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. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Forest Euphoria pulses with vitality, in the wondrous beings we encounter and Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s vivid storytelling. I’m in awe of her ability to interweave the little-known lives of slugs and fungi with memoir and social movements, so that every page broadens one’s vision. Her expansive view of life provides an antidote to the loneliness of our species.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Forest Euphoria is a gorgeous celebration of the fact that, when you give your heart to Science, it rewards you with a glimpse of something profound and beautiful.”—Hope Jahren, New York Times bestselling author of Lab Girl and The Story of More

“Just as nature resists easy categorization, so does this gem of a book. It is a heartfelt memoir. It is a lyrical feat of science writing. Perhaps above all else, it is a love letter to the messy, wondrous, complicated, binary-defying nature of the natural world—and, within it, us. I loved it.”—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us

“By revealing how the natural order of the world very often rejects the rigidity imposed by heteronormativity . . . Forest Euphoria stunningly illustrates what lessons we might be able to glean about queerness from wildlife.”—Harper’s Bazaar, “The 25 Best Books Coming Out This Spring”

“Nothing short of stunning . . . Kaishian achieves something truly singular. She establishes a kaleidoscopic vision of interconnectedness that encompasses intricate webs of communication and cooperation, while acknowledging that much always remains to be discovered. Not remotely dry, Forest Euphoria is an evocative work of profound creativity that combines scientific rigor, personal narrative, and a call for an outlook that is better, more inclusive, more true and genuinely scientific.”—Shelf Awareness

“With immense knowledge, grace, experience, and lyrical prose . . . Kaishian persuades us that there is never just one way for living things in the natural world to reproduce or evolve or interact.”—Kirkus

“Fascinating . . . Reverent . . . The lyrical prose imbues the scientific discussions with a sense of wonder [and] will leave readers in awe of nature’s many splendors.”—Publishers Weekly

“If the first lesson in how to love nature is learning to see yourself in it—and to see it in you—then Forest Euphoria is a master class in how to love the world. Whether our fellow inhabitants of this wild island planet are tiny or grand, plain or gorgeous, deceptively simple or mind-bogglingly complex, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is in love with them all. And her racing, bounding, arms-wide-open enthusiasm teaches us how to love them, too, in their full, astonishing diversity.”—Margaret Renkl, New York Times bestselling author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Forest Euphoria issues a joyous invitation to live with curiosity and love, and what could be a greater gift? I felt this invitation in the book’s scientific rigor; in its attention to the sophisticated affinity of all life; in its exacting work to orient a reader to the symmetries, puzzlements, and delights of our world.”—Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning

“Bowerbirds and river eels are among my favorite creatures on the planet because they defy expectations and break down too-human assumptions so profoundly. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s Forest Euphoria is an exaltation of the nonhuman creatures whose stories might yet teach us how to radically revise our understanding of being and coexistence on this planet. New stories of life, love, gender, grief, and joy are thriving all around us if we could simply turn away from human self-centeredness. This book thrilled me to the bone. I will never forget it.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

“Forest Euphoria is an enchanting paean to the queerness that abounds in nature, both human and nonhuman. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian writes about the small, overlooked wonders of the world—eel foreheads, blue slug penises, and tiny mushrooms that grow only on the leg of one species of ant—with such reverence and lyricism that you may find yourself awakened to new kinds of beauty. Kaishian’s universe of intimacy with the more-than-human world is radical. Let it open you up to new sensations, desires, and expectations of life itself. All of us organisms want the same thing, Kaishian argues: ‘To be sensed for who they are, to be heard, to be known, to be seen.’ An instant, exuberant classic.”—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

“Expansive and intimate, replete with resonant insights and myriad fascinating accounts of the misunderstood lifeways that course through our own lives and throughout the globe, Forest Euphoria invites us to more lovingly notice what and who is around us, to question imposed binaries and all forms of othering, to celebrate the endless queerness of nature, and its defiance of human dichotomies. In her sterling authorial debut, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian dispels the notion that science cannot inspire magic.”—Doug Bierend, author of In Search of Mycotopia

“Forest Euphoria is nothing short of a revelation. The earth is weirder, sexier, and queerer than we can imagine, and Kaishian’s poetic prose expertly balances a rigorous critique of the dominant paradigms driving ecocide as well as exulting in the sensual universes of organisms often maligned and misunderstood. The writing scintillates with spores and seeds and profound generosity.”—Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

From the Publisher