Organic Matter - by E N Couturier (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

E.N. Couturier has decided, against the wishes of everyone in her life, to work on a vegetable farm after her college graduation instead of going to grad school. In a series of diaristic entries, Organic Matter documents Couturier's experience in the fields and hoop houses over the course of one growing season as she labors alongside an eccentric cast of characters. The work is mundane, brutal, and often absurd. Pea plants slip free of their twine, diamond squash bugs munch the blighted cucumbers, and Couturier's joints grow stiff and swollen as her alienation from the urban world beyond the farm grows. With incisiveness and wry humor, Couturier grapples with her uncertain future and the uncertain future of the land that sustains us. Organic Matter paints a luminous portrait of the rural ecosystem that feeds the city and explores one perceptive young woman's relationship with faith, labor, love, family, the body, and the ground.

Review Quotes

"E.N. Couturier writes, 'If you don't think you could love a place eventually, you can't survive it.' In her moving, fragmented, essayistic memoir, Couturier has captured viscerally the exhausting, knee-cracking, yet always lively and surprising work on a small farm. This book sneaks up on you--come for the food writing, for the thousands of pounds of cabbage, the spinach growing sweaty in its farmers market bags, and stay for the rousing meditations on faith, family, and making your own way in early adulthood."

-Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child

About the Author

E.N. Couturier is an award-winning journalist and recreational farmer. Organic Matter is her first book. Her work has appeared in numerous Maine news outlets, on local radio and in publications including New World Writing, Peripheries, Eclectica Magazine, FRiGG, and jmww, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She never did go to graduate school.