accurate than most actual photographs of mushrooms. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Portraits of
Mushrooms is a book of Viazmensky’s watercolor paintings of fungi taken from two shows at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis. Te book was published to honor Sasha’s 80th birthday. For an account of his lengthy career as an artist, have a look at David O. Born’s excellent article in the summer 2025 issue of Fungi. Tere you’ll learn that Sasha’s passion for mushrooms goes back to when he was 3 years old, and he went foraging with his grandmother. In his own book Mushrooms, Russia, and History, Gordon
Wasson calls Russians “a people preeminent in mycophagy.” Sasha, however, does not restrict himself to edibles. Tus, you’ll see depictions of amanitas, corts, polypores like Fomitopsis pinicola, and ascos like Sarcoscypha austriaca in the booklet. You’ll also see that Sasha takes delight in less- than-perfect specimens. After all, perfection rests in the eyes of the beholder—i.e., the artist. Imagine an illustrated book on Homo sapiens that depicts
both toddlers and elderly folks. Sasha’s book is the equivalent, as he includes primordium phases as well as somewhat past- their-prime phases of certain species. For example, when you see a cort with a warped margin, you’ll realize that fungal decay can be quite lovely. Sasha also depicts side views rather than full frontals of certain species. As a result, entirely new diagnostic features come into view. Pine needles, mosses, grasses, dirt, and various types of
debris decorate a good many of the paintings. Tis gives you a pretty good idea of a particular species’ substrate. Certain specimens have bites taken out of them by preeminent mycophages such as squirrels, or they have radula marks left by slugs and snails. By gazing at fungi depicted with such decorations and/or features, you’ll find yourself transported to a forested area without leaving your abode. Dare I say that Sasha’s book is urgently recommended? -Lawrence Millman
Mycocosmic
Lesley Wheeler 2025, Tupelo Press 92 pages, paper ISBN-10: 1961209160 ISBN-13: 978-1961209169
L
esley Wheeler’s sixth collection of poetry,Mycocosmic, is a dazzling, incantatory offering of “intricately woven spell-
poems—prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations.” Drawing inspiration from the mycological world and, more specifically, the mycelial underworld, the poems are a lyrical call for transformation as they come to terms with buried family violence and trauma, surfacing anxieties about aging and loss, and grappling with identity, sexuality, love and death. Both death and fungi are emblems of literal decay and
figurative transformation. Perhaps that is why the two are often linked in the cultural imagination, most notably in the fungal body horror genre. Death—that of Wheeler’s mother—was the impetus forMycocosmic and lies at its emotional core, but the author eschews the horrific for the lyric, oneiric and irenic. When I asked Wheeler about the inspiration behind her interest in the fungal, she revealed the following:
46 FUNGI Volume 19:2 Summer 2026
“I’ve found mushrooms mysterious and fascinating since
childhood, when I found them in fairy stories my English mother shared. As a teacher of literary modernism, too, I knew about John Cage’s interest in fungi. [...] Around 2021, I was drafting poems about grief and fungi, having no idea why they were converging. Ten it hit me: mycelium not only connects so many beings, but it metabolizes death, as I needed to do. Tat’s when I started reading about the subject more widely and deeply, building the “underpoem” that runs through the pages of Mycocosmic out of what I found. I’m no expert, but the work of mycelium moves me and I’m continuing to study and explore the subject.” My initial reaction to learning of this “poetic mycelium”
running beneath each poem was skepticism, anticipating something contrived and choppy à la exquisite corpse-style writing. To the reader’s delight, what unfolds is indeed exquisite—an “underground” unfurling “sending tendrils across the footer of each page” with haiku-like flashes of beauty, titillating like a freeverse striptease. Te “underpoem” adds heft and depth to the “upper-verse,” like the cantus firmus in Gregorian chant and early polyphony. Sometimes the book’s references to the mycological are more
overt, as in the rousing opener, “We Could Be” and later, in one of my favorite pieces, the stunning “Dark Energy.” At other times the references are more allegorical, as in the lullingly hypnotic last poem, “Return Path.” Te fantastical and rather unsettling cover image—a delicate
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