As I drenched the various vegetable, herb, and flower beds, the phrase “permanent wilting point” popped into my head, a term that has stuck with me from my days as a soil science student. It’s a way of talking about how much water is in the soil, and is defined as “the soil water content at which plants are subject to irrecoverable wilting” (Source). Permanent, irrecoverable wilting. I always thought it was a funny way to say dead. My plant has permanently wilted and is irrecoverable now—it’s not dead. I hosed down my drooping salvia and drought-nipped bleeding hearts and hoped they weren’t irrecoverable.

If you are new here (welcome!), I shared in my last piece about my effort to finally finish a stack of thirteen books I’ve started reading over the past several years. In that essay I talked about the first three books I completed and how they resonated. Since then I have finished a fourth: “Healing Earth: An Ecologist’s Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship” by John Todd, and I am about 3/4 of the way through my fifth: “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler.

Healing Earth is an exploration of various “ecomachines” John Todd and his colleagues have designed to heal ecosystems. These approaches to ecological restoration rely on various plants’, animals’, bacteria’s, and fungi’s abilities to clean water and rebuild soil. For example, he describes how they built a contraption that used diverse living things from all those kingdoms to turn a pond contaminated with landfill runoff back into a swimmable, fishable, beautiful habitat. He described ways that this type of technology, adapted to different scales and scenarios, could even help clean up disasters as big as the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They are not quick fixes, but they would work if we decided to try.

I will write more about Parable of the Sower after I finish it, but briefly, it’s a dystopian novel set in California, with the timeline of the book starting in 2024 (which is when I started reading it). Butler seemed to look around at what was happening in the 1980s and 90s (it was published in 1993), and cranked up the heat to imagine how much worse it could get (she even called the measles resurgence we’re seeing!). Reading this back-to-back with Healing Earth made me realize: if we don’t start taking actions to fix what we’ve screwed up already, and look for more ecological, equitable ways to exist going forward, we’re heading quickly toward a Parable of the Sower world. Time to start learning how to eat acorns.

Soil scientists have come up with a variety of ways to measure soil moisture content, but the thing to remember is it’s a gradient. In plain terms, it can be saturated, moist, dry, and bone dry, a.k.a., the permanent wilting point. As I look around at the mess of the world today, I wonder where we are in that gradient. When it comes to climate change, wars around the world, human rights violations that are happening in our own neighborhoods, billionaires hording money and power, the new horror of data centers, or any number of other travesties that belong in dystopian fiction—I find myself hoping we haven’t reached a societal permanent wilting point. I know our leaves are wilted, but have we reached a tipping point where there’s no going back? Are things irrecoverable?

I don’t know the answer to those dire questions, but I choose to act as if we haven’t, and they aren’t. I choose to believe that we can heal the earth with enough collective effort pointed in the right direction. I also know it’s not a given, and it’s not going to be easy.

But I almost forgot. This is a poetry Substack. To conclude my ponderings on this hot August day, I’ll share something I wrote a while back that I remembered while writing this essay. Before you read it, just know that I know humanity faces problems that are too big for one individual’s tiny actions to solve. But sometimes it still feels good to do one minuscule good thing. It can’t hurt, right?

It Can’t Hurt

I tuck the empty
brown vanilla bottle
into the recycling bin
thinking, why bother? 
but also a little proud 
thinking, I bother. 

P.S. I never have and never will use AI to write anything. AI = thumbs down, bad for the planet, bad for our brains, bad for artists and writers whose work these companies stole.

Two people suggested I start with the books with the fewest pages left to get that satisfying box-ticking feeling. So, in the past week I have ticked three satisfying boxes: “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy), “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters” by Priya Parker, and, “Inciting Joy: Essays” by Ross Gay. Though I chose to start with these books to build some book-finishing momentum, it felt as I was reading them that the timing was right, that these books had messages I needed and was ready for now.

In Letter Eight of Rilke’s book, he says to the young poet he has been mentoring via letters, “do not be afraid when a sorrow as great as any you’ve known seems about to engulf you, casting its shadow over all you do. Remember, when you fear what might befall you, that Life has not abandoned you, that it is holding you, and out of its web you cannot fall…” Life with a capital L is holding you. Out of its web you cannot fall. I love how this doesn’t minimize the fear and sorrow, but just says, yes, it’s there, it might feel like it’s engulfing you BUT it’s actually part of a greater whole. Do not be afraid: You cannot fall. I need to write that on my forehead.

I struggle with a tendency toward fear and worry. I started seeing a therapist this year to get support as I process the grief of losing a family member to cancer last year, and also because I’ve increasingly struggled with anxiety over the past several years. Fear and anxiety skip into my brain hand in hand, and I don’t like how it feels when they take over. My world becomes smaller as I hide from whatever they tell me I should hide from: The risk of an uncomfortable interaction with someone; the risk of failing at work and looking like an idiot; the risk of failing at poetry; the risk of failing as a mother; the risk of failing as the “good person” I try to be; the risk of death and dismemberment. You know, totally rational fears.

Anxiety and fear cause me to shrink back reflexively at times, but when I notice it happening I get stubborn and I try to at least hold my ground, and if I can, to push back. When I’m smart, I ask for help to push back. After my first panic attack, I started seeing an herbalist who specializes in helping people with anxiety. She gave me compassion and understanding in our sessions and provided me with herbal support to get my nervous system a little less antsy and overreactive. At our last check-in this winter when she asked me what my goals were, I told her I wanted to be more courageous. Rilke’s reassurances help with that.

There was a chapter in “The Art of Gathering” that made me laugh, titled, “Accept That There Is an End.” Priya Parker was talking about how to end gatherings (dinner parties, funerals, Zoom meetings, etc.) meaningfully, and she met with some Zen teachers to talk about endings. The teachers said their students often avoid the last class of their nine month session because they are avoidant of endings. And they think this avoidance of endings is linked to a fear of our own mortality. And I thought, Is this why I have a giant stack of books I haven’t finished? Am I avoiding endings? Do I have a fear of death?? Ha! The answer is easy—yes, I have a fear of death. I’m not in denial that it will happen someday, I am just afraid it will happen too soon and I’ll leave my family behind in a sea of grief that I can’t help them with. Obviously. Who wants that.

So maybe my attempt to be more courageous this year includes not just my herbal teas and my therapy, but also finishing these thirteen books. Huh. It’s worth a try.

This morning, I finished “Inciting Joy.” For a book called Inciting Joy, it sure made me cry more than I thought it would. The book begins with Ross Gay talking about losing his father to cancer, and I started reading it last year right when I was starting my journey as one of my aunt’s team of carers, getting her to and from the hospital and providing other support over the nine months it took for pancreatic cancer to take her from us. I sobbed through those chapters, and realized why it’s called Inciting Joy. Because so much of life is so heavy and painful and scary, you have to work to get to the joy. Joy is effortful, but perhaps more meaningful because of that.

In the second-to-last chapter, Ross shares this wisdom: “Grief is the metabolization of change.” He says, “The griever knows, or comes to know, again and again, that it’s not only my beloved friend grandchild dog lover tree sibling auntie teacher parent relationship belief home glacier species that is changed, or gone, because when that one thing changed, everything changed. Light through the trees in October now different. The sound of the playground. Making love. Pushing the cart through the aisles of the store. Dreams. The Eagles game on Sunday. Holidays. A walk by the river. Celebration. Changing the sheets. Taking a nap. Cooking a meal. Reading a book. The future. The past. All of it changed. That is what the griever is metabolizing.”

Our bodies need to feel the change, breathe it in and out, digest it, and learn how to move through the everything-is-different-now world. Oof. When he spells it all out, and you realize he’s right… that’s a lot of metabolizing to do, again and again. Man. No wonder I was avoiding the endings of these books. None of this stuff is easy - grief, change, courage, sorrow, trust. It’s all hard to face, and the work of a lifetime.

But you know what else isn’t easy? Letting the walls close in around us until there’s no room for the expansiveness of joy.

This is supposed to be a Substack about poems, so I will end on a poem that has helped me to be brave over the years. In the early days of my husband’s and my relationship, we mailed letters to each other (on paper! through the post office!) and he shared this poem with me in a letter. It’s by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who Jeremy was lucky enough to have as a professor at the University of Tulsa back in the 90s. It winds up romantic in the last stanza, which is sweet, but it’s the first two stanzas that remind me to not settle for just parts and pieces of life. Accept no less than the whole—even the avalanches! I think all the exclamation points help. When I’m feeling afraid or sad, I can read this with gusto—even if it’s pretend gusto!—and borrow some of that bravery.

No, I’ll Not Take the Half
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No, I'll not take the half of anything!
Give me the whole sky! The far flung earth!
Seas and rivers and mountain avalanches—
All these are mine! I'll accept no less!

No, life, you cannot woo me with a part. 
Let it be all or nothing! I can shoulder that!
I don't want happiness by halves,
Nor is half of sorrow what I want.

Yet there's a pillow I would share,
Where gently pressed against a cheek,
Like a helpless star, a falling star,
A ring glimmers on a finger of your hand. 

As I wrap up, I would just like to say that I’m sharing how these books fit into the puzzle of my life. I’m not saying they will mean the same thing for anyone else. Anxiety, depression, fear, grief—these are big, hard, scary, human things, and what works for some people doesn’t work for others. Get the support YOU need. Asking for help is sometimes the bravest thing you can do.

P.S. I realized as I wrote this that I bought all three of these books mentioned here (and several others) because I heard about them on the podcast On Being, with Krista Tippett. So, thanks, On Being team!

P.P.S. I never have and never will use AI to write anything. I have only ever used AI accidentally when searching on google (which I don’t use anymore) and that damn AI summary pops up at the beginning whether we want it to or not. I now use Duck Duck Go, with the AI features turned off. Anyway, apparently there’s a big kerfuffle on Substack about AI at the moment and I just felt the need to clarify here.
AI = thumbs down, bad for the planet, bad for our brains, bad for artists and writers whose work these companies stole.

I took a little break from writing here to unplug from onlinedom while I went on a family vacation to the beautiful corner of the world known as New England. In Maine, we stayed in a rustic cabin with no electricity or internet, and relaxed into the long daylight hours that spanned the week of the summer solstice. Then in Vermont, I slept in the sanctuary of my childhood bedroom at my mom’s house, where all the sounds - the sound of the door creaking, the sound the stairs make as you go up and down them, the sound of the bathtub filling with water - all these mundane sounds you’d never pay attention to normally almost startled me with their familiarity.

It’s not a house trapped in amber, though. My mom has turned what used to be the living room into her pottery studio. While there, I could at any time grab a handful of clay and play. I made pinch pots almost every day, tuning in to the texture and firmness of the clay, feeling my way toward a shape.

In honor of this time I spent at home, I thought I would share a poem I wrote about my potter mother that I posted on my old blog back in 2010. I wrote this at a week-long poetry workshop at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. The incredible Maine poet Wesley McNair taught the class, and this poem arose from a prompt to write about someone in their work space. My mom was a teacher and studio manager for many years at the Frog Hollow Craft Center in Middlebury, Vermont, and if you know the place, you know the giant waterfall it sat next to. I can still smell the clay and hear the water behind the quiet electric hum of the turning pottery wheel.

My Mother’s Studio

When she bows over the metal wheel,
elbows resting against her thighs,
hands shaping the turning clay;

and when she rolls up, wheel paused,
and reaches behind with a wet, gray hand
for the rib lying on the table

then dips the rib and both hands
into a bucket of cloudy water
and dripping, leans in again:

the waterfall outside roils in the afternoon,
through the window sunlight falls
into the dusty air and lies warm on the table,

books of paintings by Cézanne,
Van Gogh, and Chagall, and a tape
of Bach’s variations lean next to her fired,

finished pots that wait on the shelf
by the door—five mugs, low and wide,
a stack of temoku bowls,

and penguins, glazed matte black,
looking in all directions
as if wondering how they arrived

in a pottery studio in Vermont, and who is this woman,
their apparent creator, with the spiky hair,
and the clay-smudged glasses.

I love the time-capsule quality of poems. Frog Hollow as we knew it closed many years ago and was reborn as the Middlebury Studio School, located far from any waterfalls, though still a vibrant and creative space full of artists young and old. And a tape of Bach’s variations? What ancient artifact is that?! I did see one of those matte black penguins in her living room studio while I was there last month, still seeming a little dazed, as if it’s asking, “No, really, how DID I get here? And is this where I’m supposed to be?”

But I never stopped writing poetry, and this year I found myself needing a new way to share my work that wasn’t a dusty old blog. Enter stage left: Substack.

After writing a few Substack posts, I realized I could give my newsletter a name and not have it say Nina Prater by Nina Prater. You’re getting to see my learning curve on this new platform in real time. I feel like a beginning pottery student with a lump of clay, pinching it cautiously into a rudimentary shape - it’ll be messy until I learn the medium a little better!

So, what to call what I’m doing here? That question leads to another: What am I doing here? I’m not focusing on life as a farmer/homesteader anymore, so The Elegant Agrarian no longer fits. I want to create a space to share my creative work as it enters the world. I titled my very first post “Poems in the Wild,” and I think that suits the newsletter as a whole quite well. The poems leave my hands and make their way into the wilds, hopefully fluttering into the hands of readers who need them.

I also find that writing poetry is an anything-but-tame adventure. I’m currently reading “Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times” by Tracy K. Smith, and in it she quotes the incredible Joy Harjo (who I got to see give a reading last year, it was amazing!). Joy says of writing poetry, “I am aware of stepping into a force field or dream field of language, of sound. Each journey is different, just as the ocean or the sky is never the same from one day to another…. And I go until the poem and I find each other.” As soon as I read that, I felt it. That wild, unpredictable journey to find and be found by a poem is what makes me want to do it again and again.

I write my poems from my home in the woods of the Ozarks, and in this newsletter, I’m hoping to free those wild poems into the wilds of the public view, while also celebrating the wildness of poetry in general. Poems in the Wild. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Recording this episode was medicine. We recorded it during a particularly tough news week, so going into it I was feeling just plain weary. But as I shared my old writing and talked about the many, many faults of those early attempts, I laughed so hard that at times I could barely get through the poems. And Aaron and Dave are good at laughing with you and not at you. Or maybe a better way to say it is, we’re all laughing at the bad poetry, not at the poet.

I shared one poem I wrote in college (cringe), one I wrote when I lived in Alaska, and one I wrote in Maine. Then, at the end of each episode, they kindly allow the guest to read a poem they’re actually proud of. Before we started recording, I was leaning toward reading “Relentless” because it was a Relentless kind of news week. But by the end, after all that belly laughter, I chose “Every Summer,” a poem where I tease myself for my haphazard gardening habits, and wind up reflecting on living in the moment and grabbing what life gives you. (These are both in my chapbook.)

If you want to listen to the episode, titled “Samsara, Alaska Radio, and Barnacles Feeding (w/ Nina Prater),” click the hyperlink or search for it on your preferred podcast app.

Every writer has to start somewhere. As much as I laugh at my earliest efforts, I am grateful to have made them. It’s all good practice. I’ll end this post how Aaron and Dave end their episodes: “Now go write some of your own bad poetry!”

I’m excited, but I’m also slightly nervous, because one of the two poems is a little more risque than my typical poems. It mentions the fact of (gasp) sex, which my poems almost never do. I am more comfortable talking about baking, and trees, and death —anything but sex. As a married adult woman with two kids, I probably should get over myself, but my parents read my work! Gah! So embarrassing! And they’re reading this too! Eek!

Sigh.

Anyway, the poem in question, “Through the Gate,” isn’t really about sex, it’s about marriage and making my husband laugh. But it has the s-word in it so I’m trepidatious. It also kind of disparages people who believe in God, but I don’t actually want to hurt anyone’s feelings, so, to my monotheist readers: don’t take it to heart. I will say almost anything to make my husband laugh his great, booming laugh.

The second poem that is hot off the press in Lamp Lit is “Farm Smart,” another poem about my husband and how different his brain is from mine. He’s got a really great brain, and I think more people should be impressed by it.

Also, the photography in this issue is so beautiful - I want a print copy on thick paper to pour over. I haven’t read all the poems yet, but I did happen to catch Jennifer Badot’s “Lopez Island,” which comes right after Farm Smart, and it is lovely. It has the lines “not of woe / but of wow” and how great is that. I love it.

That review was hopefully appreciated by other readers but was utterly unknown to me until 2025, when my son said, “Did you know you can Google yourself? You should Google yourself!” And so just for fun, I did, and lo and behold, there was an extraordinarily kind and insightful piece about my poems. I admit, I got teary reading it.

Last year was a rough one for me. Politically, the world was (and is) burning faster and hotter than anyone can cope with. Personally, we lost our Aunt Shanna to pancreatic cancer, a cancer that moves faster and harder than anyone can cope with. Last year was heavy. This review was a small point of light piercing the darkness. I felt seen and understood, and as someone just starting out in my publishing career, that was a gift.

Sarah wrote, “She helps us slow down to savor small joys along with her.” Last year, savoring small joys felt like a survival strategy, a way to stay afloat between trips to the hospital. Reading the book review made me to realize that my tendency to find gratitude for these small, everyday joys might help someone else do the same. These poems weren’t written with a purpose like that in mind, but it is heartening to know they might have a purpose anyway.

If you feel like reading the review, here it is! If you need a copy of my book after reading it, here that is!

An unpublished “review” I received from a friend that made me so happy was that she keeps a copy of my book in her bathroom. I love that my poems are at home absolutely anywhere. I mean it. Stick a copy among your bathroom magazines. Put one on your cookbook shelf. Throw one in your glove box. You never know when you might have a moment or two for a poem.

“Outside Taliano’s”, at Literary Mama

“Acceptance,” at One Sentence Poems

“How I Feel Every Night After My Kids Fall Asleep,” at One Sentence Poems

Three Poems at Buddhist Poetry Review

“Balance,” at Painted Pebble Lit Mag

“Digging Thistles,” at Painted Pebble Lit Mag

“The Real Question,” at Literary Mama (Content warning: addresses the death of a child in the community.)

Many of these poems appear in my chapbook, Under the Canopy of Unpruned Leaves, published in 2023 by Belle Point Press, so if you like them, you can have a physical copy to enjoy, complete with beautiful cover art by my talented mother, Kathy Clarke

Here’s the publisher’s description of my chapbook:

In this debut chapbook by Arkansas poet Nina Prater, simple acts become meditative practices. Domestic and outdoor worlds converge in the internal life of a speaker attuned to the transformative potential within everyday moments. Whether sifting flour, admiring the Ozarks, or pondering life's shifting seasons, the voice in Under the Canopy of Unpruned Leaves takes comfort in a home that leaves room for joy in the face of an often-precarious world.

I hope you enjoy these poems! And if you don’t, that’s okay too! Sometimes people say they don’t like poetry, but to me that’s like saying you don’t like music. You don’t have to like ALL poetry - maybe you just haven’t found the right kind of poetry for you yet. Keep looking. There’s something for everyone out there.