Mycocosmic cover & pre-order link!!!

I am SO EXCITED to reveal the cover to my sixth poetry book, MYCOCOSMIC! It’s also available for preorder from Tupelo Press at this link, and it officially marches forth on March 4th, 2025. The cover art is from a series entitled “Radiant Void” by Pearl Cowan, whose other works you can also see on Instagram and at Good Naked Gallery. I’m in awe of Cowan’s weirdly lovely combination of the spiritual and the fungal. As I was processing changes in my life, especially my mother’s death and the terrible freedom it brought to tell the truth, I was reading in Merlyn Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and elsewhere about how hidden mycelial networks enable trees to talk to each other–connecting us all–as well how fungus eats decay, preventing death from overwhelming the world. That’s when my book about grief and change began to thread together, when I noted the mycelial motif threading through it like fungal hyphae.

Like mycelium, this whole project has been seething underground for a while, and what a miracle to see it fruit. I feel so happy about it–light of heart. Now my mission is to maintain that lightness throughout the labor of getting the word out, which always involves a mix of successes and failures. Rationally I think rejections and inattention are just part of the writing life, nothing personal, plus lord knows there’s this big corporate publishing machine doing its best to dominate media coverage. Yet poetry is a whole-heartedness business, so it’s not easy to stay logical. I hereby vow to do my best, not just about trying for my slice of that attention, but at maintaining grounded peace at the randomness of it all.

Doing my best Part I: I have digital ARCs now and bound ones coming, so please let me know (wheelerlm at wlu dot edu) if you’d consider the book for a review or class adoption (I’m happy to hop on Zoom with your students). Tupelo also has a form for requesting classroom examination copies here, and their in-house publicist is Kristina Marie Darling, who can help with copies for reviews and other press coverage.

I also have two virtual readings in the very near future where I’ll be previewing Mycocosmic:

Oct. 22, 7:00 pm EDT: Writers Room of Boston virtual reading with author Beth Armstrong. Register for the free Zoom webinar here.

Nov. 2, 5 pm EST: Lit Balm reading via Zoom and Facebook Live Stream (https://www.facebook.com/LitBalm/)

As always, I’m all ears (and mushroom gills?) about any festivals, reading series, or anything else you think I should try for. And thank you bigtime for sticking with me for this long. I’m very grateful. So grateful it makes my sentences short. I’m stumped about how to say it.

I’ll leave you with a shot my spouse took at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis on 10/10, when I read with Heid E. Erdrich. Athena Kildegaard, who arranged the whole shindig, got sick. It was a bummer to miss Athena but the energy of the event was wonderful AND it manifested for me a few people I’ve only met virtually, including the wonderful scholarly-musicianly poetry blogger Frank Hudson. What Robert Frost called “barding around” has lovely moments, and this was one of them.