Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations

by Cutter Wood

An “UNEXPECTEDLY PROFOUND,” “DEEPLY STRANGE,” and “UTTERLY UNIQUE tour of the human body” (Publishers Weekly)

"A must read for anyone who’s ever been amazed or aghast at what just came out." — Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

To live, our bodies must continuously shed materials. Stop urinating, stop defecating, stop expelling breath, and death is near. While we often think of these materials as embarrassing waste products, they serve far more complex functions. The color of our mucus, the volume of our flatus, the rhythm of our breath: taken together, these materials tell a story of the human that produced them. Moreover, the exchange, elimination, and frequent disguise of our effluence has been elemental to the development of human civilization, and our lives today are still governed by a host of laws and superstitions and social mores about the materials our bodies leave behind.

In each of twelve discrete chapters, Earthly Materials tells a story about one of the materials the human body sheds—from breath and urine to vomit and tears. Sometimes the questions examined are historical: What have we physically done with all the urine produced in our cities? Sometimes they approach the matter through a philosophical lens: Is it ever logical to cry? Sometimes they explore recent scientific discoveries: How is mucus forcing us to reconsider our understanding of natural selection? But they always offer a window into how we negotiate our place in the world and how we get along with one another. Cutter Wood's delightfully weird, richly informative, and unexpectedly poetic tour of our bodily excretions uncovers extraordinary truths about ourselves--and the human story.

Genres: Nonfiction

384 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2025

About the author

Cutter Wood completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010, during which time he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper’s and other magazines. After serving as a Provost Fellow at UI and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville, Wood moved to New York. For his forthcoming book, Love and Death in the Sunshine State, he was awarded a 2018 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was super excited for this book because of it's subtitle (the title itself doesn't necessarily help understand what the book is about) and I have seen some early buzz in book publication magazines and the like. So I borrowed it from the library and was sucked in, but unevenly so, throughout the book.

I am a fan of nonfiction, especially science though I am nowhere near a scientist-- call me an armchair scientist enjoying learning about life through this lens. I like Mary Roach and Bill Bryson, Sy Montgomery and any number of books about animals (I just finished Slither for instance). However this was uneven in execution. There is nothing that ties it all together because even the "emissions, excretions, and disintegrations" allowed for a chapter on flatulence and tears but then an unexpected one on hair (though I guess it qualifies) and semen, among many others. But the problem becomes the selections and focus for each chapter is wildly unpredictable. Some are goofier and others are more serious. Some are anecdotes and others are a personal experience. As a reader, you can figure out what topics he loved because those chapters were arguably longer and provided an overabundance of information rather than selecting a story or two to share. He had too much fun with semen for instance and (maybe expectedly for a man writing about menses) was a little lackluster in his approaches to menses and milk in the sense that he went funny or satirical with a touch of science.

Ultimately, I wanted more organization and focus because the topic is fabulously interesting, but it was a good start.

"BII (blood injection injury) phobia is in the DSM-5 alongside spiders, lightning, enclosures, heights, crowds, journeys alone, drowning, suffocating, and all the other classic Hitchcokian phobias. But BII is different. Like the others, it's characterized initially by the standard autonomic fight-or-flight response. The body undergoes tachycardia, a rapid and irregular beating of the heart, as well as a jump in blood pressure. But in BII phobia that initial reaction abruptly reverses. In a moment, the heart rate drops dramatically, blood pressure decreases, and the rising panic melts into a woozy vasovagal response: sweating, nausea, ringing in the ears, narrowing of the field of vision to a smaller and small circumference, and you faint... Those who suffer from BII show "prioritized visual processing of blood.""

"Put a hand on your abdomen and rock your body side to side. If you can feel or hear a sloshing in your stomach- what's called a succession splash- it's a sign that your most recent meal has been detained in its digestive journey. Possibly, the pyloric sphincter is blocked by a tumor or a foreign object. Or, in the continual chatter that occurs between the digestive tract and brain- the gut-brain axis- it's possible your body has concluded the matter in the stomach should proceed no farther. In either case, whether you feel ill yet or not, the succession splash is a decent sign that vomit's in your future."

"Contrary to what many assume, tears don't come out of the tear ducts at the inner corner of the eye. The ducts in fact, are siphons that drain tears from the eye into the nasal passages, which is why crying often makes the nose run Tears are actually produced for the most part by glands hidden above the eye and released from way up under the eyelid."

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you “unfit to manipulate ham”? Does savage indignation often lacerate your heart? If an elephant shrew, an orangutan, a mastiff bat, a spiny mouse, and a human all walk into a bar, which ones have their period, and what could happen next? To find out, brace for a Valsalva maneuver and check out Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations by NEA and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellow Cutter Wood. When you get right down to it, perhaps we are akin to Martin Luther, “a ripe shit, and the world a gigantic asshole,” from which we will soon part. We breathe, we bleed, we cry, we “get stuff in one end of the tube and let it out the other.” We deciduate, we disintegrate, we grow up, and we break down. Meaning sheds each body until all that’s left is words.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. There is no central theme or structure; each chapter is its own essay, with a mix of some science about the topic, plus something else. The 'something else' is wide-ranging, from a baby formula theft trial to an ayahuasca trip to the fart games played by young boys.

Wood was upfront about the lack of a through-line, so the randomness did not bother me. I was actually entertained by seeing what would pop up next. That said, I would not be surprised if some readers were not as happy with the variety as I was. Also, anybody looking for a book chock-full of cool 'gross' facts will be disappointed. But I was hooked and had a fun time with the book.

[R.Q. Woodward · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are twelve chapters in this book, so disjointed they make more sense as essays written by various authors. Most of the chapters earn zero stars from me, but I kept reading just because they were so different, I didn’t know what could possibly come next.

Blood I’d rate 3 stars
Hair 4 stars
Every other chapter negative stars ranging to one Star.

[David Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up mainly to learn more about mucus, a subject of recent concern for me, but there’s tons of fascinating facts to go around, most memorably an expose of the huge infant formula black market.