Wondering at Our Connections to the World Around Us

Derek F. DiMatteo

September 17, 2025

World of Wonders (2020) is a collection of brief nature memoir essays by poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil, accompanied by illustrations by Fumi Mini Nakamura. Subtitled “In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments,” the essays draw connections between the author’s life experiences and a wide range of flora and fauna, many of which are rare or endangered, and about which the essays often include interesting biological and botanical facts. The essays average 5 pages long, with the shortest being about 3 pages and the longest about 12 pages, making them quick reads—and therefore allowing frequent opportunities for readers to sit with and reflect on the ideas, perhaps triggering your own memories of moments of wonder.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s essays make many references to her childhood and parents as well as to her own adulthood and career. She was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1974. Her mother is Filipina and her father South Indian, and both are medical professionals, whose ability to remain open to the wonder of the world around them—and to model that wonder for Aimee and her sister—helped instill in her a love for nature and a love of writing. Her parents moved frequently for work when she was a child, including periods in Kansas, Arizona, and Ohio, experiences that she mentions in her essays, often noting the difficulties she experienced constantly being the new girl at school, especially when she was one of the only brown girls in her community. After completing her BA in English and MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction at The Ohio State University, she taught in western New York for fifteen years before moving to Oxford, Mississippi with her husband and two sons to become a professor in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.

While reading, I found myself starting to create categories for the essays. One category of essay focuses on how the natural element reminds Nezhukumatathil of a personal experience. An example is seen in “Potoo,” where she recounts learning to mimic the bird call of cardinals at age six—a skill that she combined with her mimicry of the stillness of the Potoo to enable her to have sustained conversations with cardinals. In the essay “Cara Cara Orange,” sharing this delicious citrus fruit becomes a multi-generational connection between herself eating the oranges that her mom packed in her lunch and her own children begging for slices of fresh citrus from the grove at their grandparents’ Florida home. In the piece titled “Ribbon Eel,” she notices the similarity between the ribbon eel’s curved mouth and the frequently delighted smile of one of her sons when he was a baby.

Other essays identify traits that she envies or finds fascinating in non-human species. Examples include “Touch-Me-Nots,” “Red Spotted Newt,” “Cassowaries,” and “Fireflies (Redux).” In “Touch-Me-Nots,” she observes how the running your fingers across the surface of the leaves causes them to “give a shudder and a shake and quickly fold shut, like someone doesn’t want to spill a secret” (p. 25). She reflects on how useful this skill would be for women who don’t wish to be touched by strangers (p. 27). The Red Spotted Newt essay caught my attention because of the amazing homing ability of these little lizards that is enabled by the presence of “a ferromagnetic mineral in their bodies” and their “capacity to memorize sun- and starlight patterns” (p. 140). The essay on Fireflies both celebrates the experience of playing outside at nightfall and seeing the blinking lights of a field of fireflies, and laments the loss of that experience for those in her children’s generation who grow up never playing freely outside but are rather always inside with their noses mere inches from the glow of their digital screens.

Finally, there are those in which human interaction with nature can simply be saddening. For me this included the essays “Octopus,” “Grey Cockatiel,” and the piece I’ll abbreviate as “Questions While Searching.” The essay about the octopus captures the thrill of holding a live octopus in her hands with the distress of that same octopus immediately dying from asphyxiation while clutching her forearm. The story about the cockatiel involves her parents searching the neighborhood for their pet, which they accidentally allowed to escape the house, and their subsequent delight when it returned of its own volition, whereupon they promptly clipped its flight feathers. Finally, the piece I refer to as “Questions While Searching” is written not as an essay but simply the arrangement of a series of questions posed by her children as they go bird spotting. The questions are less about nature and more about the activities happening in their lives, such as active shooter drills at school. What I found particularly poignant was the connection the children seemed to make between the way that bees are disappearing and how that would be bad also for humans, and the way that their parents would someday also “disappear” from the planet, perhaps in 60 years’ time.

World of Wonders contains 26 of Fumi Nakamura’s whimsical illustrations, which are partially colored and scattered throughout the book’s interior pages, with a few also appearing in full color on the endpapers and flyleaves (at least inside the Milkweed hardcover edition). Nakamura illustrates using gouache, graphite, color pencil, and gansai on various types of paper such as Stonehenge Hotpress paper. Her illustrations correspond to the titles of Nezhukumatathil’s essays. My favorite illustrations are the firefly with its partially spread wings and yellow light brightly shining (p. 8); the rose gold axolotl smiling out at the reader while clutching a bouquet of long-stemmed aqueous leafy plants (p. 42); the dragon fruit, both its exterior which looks like it’s aflame and its cross-section with its exposed fruit and black seeds (p. 112); and the south Philippine dwarf kingfisher, a burst of orange, pink, and purple perched on a branch rendered in black and white (p. 178).

Overall, reading the essays in World of Wonders felt a little like a conversation with the author in which we sometimes got sidetracked but always somehow wound up back on topic by the end of the essay. In this respect, they sort of remind me of the memoir essays in poet Ross Gay’s Book of Delights (which I highly recommend and about which I’ve written), However, Nezhukumatathil’s essays follow a looser structure, are often airier, and feel less conversational than Gay’s pieces. They are also much more loosely structured and less densely packed narratively and informatively than Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (which I also recommend and have written about). Nezhukumatathil’s pieces are light, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, making for enjoyable interludes taken here and there throughout a busy month.

References and Further Reading

Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Algonquin Books, 2019.

Nakamura, Fumi Mini. [web site]. https://www.miniminiaturemouse.com/

Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Van Wing, Sage. [Interview]. “Poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil on ‘World of Wonders’.” Oregon Public Broadcasting. April 18, 2024. https://www.opb.org/article/2024/04/18/aimee-nezhukumatathil-world-of-wonders/.

The Ohio State University. [Interview]. “Aimee Nezhukumatathil discusses 'World of Wonders,' Asian American representation in environmental writing.” March 22, 2021. https://artsandsciences.osu.edu/news/aimee-nezhukumatathil-discusses-world-wonders-asian-american-representation-environmental.