This is a book about writing as righting. At midlife Diane P. Freedman turns to the books of Thoreau, not to mention his landscapes. Practicing the nature cure and the narrative cure, she  writes, in poems, essays, and journals, about family, feminism, and literary history, loss, divorce, dating, accidents, animals, waterways, local landscapes, and teaching environmental literature in ruburban New Hampshire. She sojourns with books and domestic beasts, tramps brambles and trails, and basks in language, love, and lake-??front sun. Thoreau loved a "broad margin" in his life and Whitman, another influence, "a certain free margin." Out of these, Carl Bode maintained-and Freedman shows-poetry could grow. Taking direction also from new environmental writers such as Ian Marshall, John Elder, Janisse Ray, Sandra Steingraber, and Amy Seidl and from other hybrid or narrative and autobiographical critics, this is a book of intense observation, advocacy, lyricism, sweetness, and sadness.