Forest euphoria The abounding queerness of nature

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)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.