Burke Book Club | Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
Date & Time
Thursday, March 18, 2027
6:45 p.m.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
This event is in the past.
Tickets
FREE and open to the public;
Registration required.
Join us for a relaxing evening with the Burke Book Club!
Each meeting, we’ll hear from Burke staff about a book they recommend. Feel free to read the book ahead of time, or join us to learn more about the selection.
Our March selection is Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.
All book club titles are available for purchase in the Burke Store.
About Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.
Growing up, Patricia Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.
Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you. (
