Welcome to the marriage of heaven and earth, as Andy Weil would say. We are celebrating the fungal universe in all its sizes, shapes, uses, cults, controversies and philosophies from myco-remediation of forest clearcuts & oil spills to the gustatory delights of myco-culinary expertise, from Nobel Prize speakers to ecstatic marching bands, from lumpers to splitters, from medicinal potions to entheogenic speculations. To wed is to join together, and Britt Bunyard, Editor of Fungi magazine, and Art Goodtimes, of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, have linked up to offer you poems from the Telluride Institute's Talking Gourds Program, poems that have appeared in Fungi, and poems that were originally performed at the Festival. Shroomfest, as some of us like to call it, is a serious citizen-science conference, symposium, workshop, and convocation in which parades, poetry and performance have not been strangers. Many poets have read on the mushroom stage before talks by such luminaries as Gary Lincoff, Dr. Weil, Paul Stamets, Laura Huxley, Sasha Shulgin, Joan Halifax, Terence McKenna, Dolores LaChapelle, Ralph Abraham, and Lynn Margulis. As for any good American verse product, robust enough to follow in the ways of Whitman and Dickinson, Cardenal and Harjo, we have aimed for a diversity of voices rather than a uniformity of value. This is the kind of volume to plant beside your pillow, and harvest slowly over time. Especially during those long winter months when neither morels nor pfifferlings appear in one's basket. Come join in the lyric sporulation!.