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This weird, wonderful exploration considers the social, cultural, and political implications of bodily emissions as well as their science, but shines brightest in its empathetic storytelling.

Cutter Wood (Love and Death in the Sunshine State) offers a spellbinding collection of facts, observations, and musings in Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. In 12 chapters that might be termed “essays” and Wood calls “stories,” he considers mucus, urine, blood, semen, menses, milk, flatulence, breath, feces, vomit, hair, and tears. While readers will certainly gain new and fascinating scientific knowledge, what makes Earthly Materials so special is storytelling: Wood’s compassionate, funny, earnest explorations through unexpected subject matters adjacent to bodily fluids.

At a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he meets impassioned graduate students and views beautiful stellar-like magnifications of mucus, which resemble Hubble Telescope photographs. He discusses the political and financial implications of donating blood and delves into the discomfiting r/NoFap Reddit forum. In the absorbing true-crime case of Formula Mom, a Florida woman is investigated and sentenced to prison for creating a large-scale business that bought and sold infant formula.

Tongue-in-cheek, Wood describes the flatulence customs and practices of the preadolescent male in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. To explore vomit, he joins the Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth and takes its sacrament. These experiences and studies often yield hilarity in Wood’s expert prose: dryly witty, comically verbose, and poignant. Wood finishes with the inexplicable tears of a Wimbledon finalist, in this thought-provoking philosophical study that exemplifies human interconnectedness through the rather surprising lens of bodily fluids and expulsions. Earthly Materials will change the way readers think about the mundane in unanticipated and transcendent ways.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, essays, nonfiction, science, Shelf Awareness |