Navigating the tightrope between personal fulfillment and societal expectation: A Review of Organic Matter by E.N. Couturier
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.
For today’s post, Jodi Balas will be reviewing E.N. Couturier’s new book called Organic Matter, which is available now from Autofocus Books.
Here’s an overview:
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.
Organic Matter by E.N. Couturier
Review by Jodi Balas
Organic Matter by E.N. Couturier is a must-read for anyone who has ever longed to feel the earth beneath their nail beds; for those who crave a tangible connection to life beyond screens and social conventions. Couturier’s work is an intimate meditation on selfhood, belonging, and the strange solace we often find in routine — especially when that routine is rooted, quite literally, in the soil.
From the first page, there is a comfort and familiarity in Couturier’s voice, a reassurance that the reader is not alone in wrestling with internal demons. The book reads like a shared confidant — an open letter to those navigating the tightrope between personal fulfillment and societal expectation. Themes of internal and external judgment, the tug of routine, and the endless search for what makes a life meaningful are on full display. Rather than offering clean answers, Couturier invites the reader to join her in the uncertainty, to walk (or dig) beside her as she tries to untangle the same knots we often face in our own lives.
The physical backdrop of Organic Matter is a working farm, but its emotional landscape is much vaster. Couturier takes us through the rhythms of agricultural life, showing how repetitive, often grueling daily work can become both a grounding force and a mirror for internal change. She writes of this work as almost godly in nature, pulling her out of her own head and into the present moment despite weeks bent over in fields that wreak havoc on the physical self. These tasks, while physically demanding, are not portrayed as drudgery. Instead, they serve as the quiet scaffolding on which a new version of herself begins to quietly take shape.
Photo by Nicolas Weldingh
Much of the memoir’s tension arises from the contrast between Couturier’s chosen path and the one she was expected to take. There is an undercurrent of shame and judgment for not following a more traditional trajectory — forgoing graduate school and other “respectable” milestones in favor of manual labor in the open air. This choice places her outside the mainstream narrative of success, and Organic Matter is, in part, about making peace with that deviation. She steps away from the prescribed path not in rebellion, but because she is drawn toward a life that feels truer, even if it’s harder to explain at dinner parties.
On the farm, there is little time for overthinking. Her hands become extensions of the earth itself, moving instinctively through planting, harvesting, and tending. In these moments, the self-consciousness that shadows her in other contexts fades away. She is present, rooted, and necessary. The pain in her body becomes a reminder that she is both giving and receiving from the land.
Yet, this is not simply a pastoral idyll. Couturier’s prose is laced with a questioning spirit about who she is becoming, whether there is a God, and what any of it ultimately means. These existential musings are balanced by her flippant, sometimes self-deprecating humor, a combination that makes this work deeply relatable. She is keenly self-aware, and there is a raw honesty in the way she writes about her struggles to connect with others. This thirst for connection, and the awkwardness that sometimes accompanies it, is one of the most human elements of the book.
Relationships in Organic Matter are complex and often fraught. Couturier writes about moments of detachment, the ways in which she sometimes feels removed from those around her, even as she longs to be understood. Yet the work on the farm binds her to something she cannot — and does not wish to — detach from, as if the land itself refuses to let her go, pulling her back with the rhythm of the seasons. In this way, the farm becomes both a sanctuary and a crucible, shaping her identity while demanding her full presence.
The beauty of Organic Matter lies in its dual cultivation. As Couturier tends to the farm’s growth cycles, she is also tending to her own. The metaphor is never heavy-handed but runs quietly beneath the text — the turning of the soil mirroring the turning of the self, the slow ripening of crops echoing the slow ripening of understanding. This book captures the truth that personal transformation is not always dramatic; sometimes it is slow, unremarkable, and visible only in hindsight.
Themes of internal and external judgment, the tug of routine, and the endless search for what makes a life meaningful are on full display. Rather than offering clean answers, Couturier invites the reader to join her in the uncertainty, to walk (or dig) beside her as she tries to untangle the same knots we often face in our own lives.
Couturier’s writing style is both grounded and lyrical, with an eye for sensory detail that makes the reader feel the texture of the soil, the ache of the muscles, and the relief of cool water on a hot day. Her humor, often sly and unexpected, prevents the book from becoming overly earnest. Instead, it feels like a conversation with a friend who is willing to tell you the unvarnished truth about their life — even the parts that don’t fit neatly onto an Instagram post.
In the end, Organic Matter is not simply about farming, nor is it a tidy self-help manual disguised as a memoir. It is about learning to live in the tension between who we are told to be and who we actually are. It’s about the messy process of becoming, the ways in which physical labor can strip away the noise and bring us back to ourselves. It’s about finding meaning not in grand achievements, but in the small, daily acts that root us to a place, to a community, and to our own bodies.
For those who have ever felt adrift, judged, or out of step with the expected order of things, Couturier’s work offers both solidarity and challenge. She reminds us that meaning can be cultivated in unexpected places, that there is value in work others might dismiss, and that sometimes the only way to find yourself is to get your hands dirty. Organic Matter is, in the truest sense, a book about growth. Not just the growth on the farm, but of a person finding her place in the world.
Praise for Organic Matter:
“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
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.
Jodi Balas is a poet based out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been featured in The Shore, December Magazine, Chestnut Review, McNeese Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review Poetry Prize, and her poem “Bone Density” was chosen by Danusha Lameris as the winning poem for the 2023 Comstock Review Poetry Prize. She is currently marketing her first book titled Only the Body Knows.
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