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
2025-04-04
The science behind nature’s diverse biology.
Mycologist Kaishian’s erudite interpretation of the queerness of biology is filled with intriguing facts and lessons about the natural world. It’s also made personal with generous anecdotes braided in from the author’s own history and identity struggles as a youth experiencing gender dysphoria, as well as an ordeal of sexual trauma and adult ADHD. Growing up on the eastern border of New York state, Kaishian was “unafraid of the organisms around me” and connected early on to various snake species in her backyard; their habitats and the surrounding forests and swamps became her euphoric refuge throughout a childhood fraught with ambiguous orientation. As she came to better understand her own queer self, her personalized interest in the queerness and biodiversity of biology and ecology grew into her life’s passion. Framing her scientific exploration on the globe’s vast microcosmos of creatures around her existence as a queer person, Kaishian illuminates the diversity of nature with studies on ambiguously sexed, magnetic-sensing eels or slipper snails, which all start out male, then form a pile and remain male or transition to female; the cassowary, a large, flightless species of bird relative to the ostrich, possessing intersexed reproductive organs; and the microbiomes unique to each human body, which the author dubs “ancient communal swamps.” Whether it be the same-sex affiliations of bowerbirds, the lifestyles of crows, or the interminable sexes of fungi, the author enthusiastically brings these species to vibrant life with a bevy of fascinating facts. With immense knowledge, grace, experience, and lyrical prose (a description of her ritualistic consumption of psychedelic mushrooms is particularly vivid), Kaishian persuades us that there is never just one way for living things in the natural world to reproduce or evolve or interact and that greater, more diversified ecological possibilities beautifully coexist.
A celebratory appreciation of the ubiquity of queerness in the natural world.
