Forest Euphoria is a revelatory journey through the wild, slippery, and spectacular queerness of the natural world—an urgent, lyrical exploration that shatters the binaries we’ve inherited about gender, species, and even what it means to be “human.” Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian blends memoir and science with a tender precision, inviting us to see nature as not separate from ourselves but deeply entangled with all of its “undesirable” and uncategorizable beings: fungi with thousands of sexes, intersex slugs, glass eels whose genders remain mysteries until their final year. Here, queerness isn’t just identity—it’s ecology, time, and relationality writ large.

Kaishian’s reflections on kinship with snakes, swamps, and fungi pulse alongside sharp critiques of colonialism’s ongoing assault on both biodiversity and marginalized bodies. She draws on Indigenous frameworks like kincentric ecology and refuses the human exceptionalism that science often upholds, reminding us that we evolved alongside microbes, fungi, and animals, bound in a community where time itself is a shared rhythm. The draining of wetlands, the enforcement of rigid taxonomy, and the violent erasures wrought by capitalism all thread through her argument, showing how control over nature mirrors control over bodies and identities.

What resonates most is how Forest Euphoria makes room for the ambiguous, the in-between, and the unclassifiable—not just in nature, but in ourselves. It’s a fierce, tender call to embrace complexity, to reject productivity as the sole measure of worth, and to reimagine our relationships with all beings as collaborative and compassionate. This book is a balm for anyone who’s ever felt out of place or boxed in, offering instead a vision of life that is webby, fluid, and unapologetically queer.

For lovers of intersectional ecology, queer theory, and radical care, Forest Euphoria will shift the way you see the living world—and your place within it. It’s a wild, necessary read for our times.

📖 Read this if you love: queer ecology, radical nature writing, and intersectional explorations of identity and belonging; the works of Robin Wall Kimmerer or Sunaura Taylor. Specifically recommended for my friends Dak and Julia.

🔑 Key Themes: Queerness and Fluidity in Nature, Kincentric Ecology and Interdependence, Colonialism and Ecological Violence, Ecological Justice and Collective Care.