The poems is Mycocosmic pulse. Each word is an electric impulse, firing like a neuron across a mycelial network. This is a collection that decomposes, recycles, regenerates— mirroring the unseen mycelium beneath our feet, the tangled web of fungal threads that sustains life in the forest. That's where Wheeler meets us— not in lofty abstraction, but rooted in soil, where decay and transformation are always underway. 

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This is a collection about networks. Not the clean circuitry of the digital world, but the messy, rotting, fertile connective tissue of ecosystems, memory, and inheritance. It's about what connects us— genetically, biologically, historically— and what happens when those connections are disrupted or reimagined. 

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Wheeler doesn't ask us to look away from what's rotting underfoot. She asks us to acknowledge it. She insists we see it not as an ending, but as a beginning. The invitation is clear from the opening poem, "We Could Be": 

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                                                                     "mycelial eating toxins together,

                                                                     decomposing what's still indigestible

                                                                     about this place. The singed taste.

                                                                     Could spread our soiled hands wide,

                                                                     vegetate, infiltrate, collaborate."

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The "we" here is pivotal to our understanding of the poem. Who are we in this process? Are we helping to clean up, or are we part of the toxins being consumed? Are we collaborators or contaminants? This ambiguity runs throughout the poems.

Wheeler makes room for it. 

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Time is equally ambiguous. It doesn't move in a straight line. It loops, folds, repeats. In "Return Path," Wheeler writes: 

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                                                                   "I never thought a circuit

                                                                    would loop through me, believed I was separate,

                                                                    alone, done with gods, but here it is:

                                                                    I've found a way to pray."

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This is not faith in the traditional sense. It's not doctrine, but design. A realization that we are part of a much larger structure— what Donna Haraway might call "tentacular thinking." The self is no longer solitary; it is networked. Wheeler's poems loop through history, family, science, myth. They recall and directly reference the Modern American voices of Williams, Dickinson, Whitman, Plath, Freud— but not in a way that necessarily idolizes them. Wheeler composts her influences. She breaks them down and grows something entirely her own. 

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From "Carpenter Ants with Zombie Fungus": 

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                                                                   "Mycelium knows some things 

                                                                    about what the dogwood strain for, 

                                                                    undercover, and what I dream, 

                                                                    world I can't call mine branching 

                                                                    and blooming in the sense of choosing 

                                                                    among histories and futures always 

                                                                    present, all at once, commensally."

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That word— commensally— is key. Wheeler isn't trying to extract or dominate. She's living alongside, listening. In "In Weird Waters Now", she reminds us: 

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                                                                  "The past 

                                                                    is a noisy cataract. Don't even try 

                                                                    to resist it." 

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The poet doesn't resist. She dives in. What she finds is not only a history but a blended world of mysticism and microbiology. In "Early Cretaceous Swims Up to the Bar": 

 

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                                                                 "the phosphorescent gar haunting 

                                                                  the Hillsborough River, although 

                                                                  sources said there was no such thing." 

 

 

Wheeler leans into mystery, not to obscure meaning, but to let it breathe. And throughout, she shows us that these networks  are not only ecological or literary, but deeply personal. In "Extended Release," she writes of the tenuous relationship between mother and daughter, the ache of caregiving and addiction: 

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                                                                 "What's your favorite place? she asks. I smell 

                                                                   the ringing edge of the ocean. Hers is a garden. 

                                                                   But there can be a garden near a beach, I say, 

                                                                   full of tropical flowers, we can be neighbors. 

                                                                   She might smile under palm fronds there, lit 

                                                                   by hibiscus, full-bellied and finally warm."

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This is not sentimentality. This is survival. It's the aching of the hope that closeness, even imagined, is still a kind of touch. The collection doesn't shy away from grief or discomfort. It lives in the hard stuff. 

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One of the most inspired features of the collection is what Wheeler calls "Underpoem [Fire Fungus]." Beneath the primary text of each page runs a footer line— a thinner stream of language composed of fragments, scientific data, alternate phrasing. It's as though the page itself has roots, a kind of rhizome growing continuously and horizontally underground, in every direction at once. This is how Mycocosmic moves: laterally, unpredictably, rooting itself in unexpected places. "Underpoem" becomes the rhizomatic body of the collection— subterranean, sustaining, always present just beneath your feet. 

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Wheeler's work is playful, yes. But it is also urgent. Mycocosmic was written in a world already unraveling. Wildfires rage, ecosystems collapse, democracy teeters. And yet these poems don't veer into despair. They stay rooted in possibility. 

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In "Memorandum of Understanding," Wheeler writes: 

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                                                                 "Power cables 

                                                                  are insulated by the air itself. Overhead

                                                                  it mumbles and sometimes shrieks. 

                                                                  I can feel its tendrils reaching for me." 

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This isn't resolution. It's recognition. The world doesn't end with a bang or a whimper— it keeps muttering in the margins. Wheeler leaves us with an open circuit. 

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But Wheeler insists that in the margins, there is kinship. In the rot, there is regeneration. In the spore, there is revolution: 

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                                                                  "you have to wonder what futures 

                                                                   each mushroom lifts into being, 

                                                                   tender manifestoes inscribed in gills, 

                                                                   & how they will disperse— but

                                                                   they are dispersing, believe it—

                                                                   long live the revolution of the spore!—"

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Mycocosmic doesn't offer answers, and it doesn't need to. It offers participation. It tells us that we are a part of the decay, yes—but also the bloom.