In Risa Bear’s “Or Otherwise,” a summer of beets becomes a small study in gratitude that does not require perfection. A woman muses that the seeds she planted directly all refused to sprout, while the ones she started in flats thrived, contradicting the seedsmen’s advice. Then, after transplanting, gophers found nearly every beet. What remains is partial—roots “not quite finished,” muddy half-moons rediscovered in winter. Rather than lamenting the ruined crop, she steams what is left and tells herself that nothing is better than gifted beetroot, gopher bitten or otherwise. The poem’s central insight is that value survives damage; what can be salvaged is still nourishment.
The construction is as informal and unhurried as the voice it records. Lines spill over their endings without punctuation, so “all summer / Every seed she’d planted out refused / Every opportunity to sprout” runs forward with the same stubborn rhythm as a long growing season. The exclamation “well!” after the mention of transplanting breaks that rhythm with a shrug, a wry half-laugh before the gophers arrive. There is no rhyme scheme, but the poem is held together by sound: the long e of “beets,” “seed,” and “refused” returns in “steamed,” while the repeated hard g of “gophers” and “gifted” ties the pest to the gift itself. The line “Rare was the beet that was not found by gophers” has a mock-solemn balance, as if the garden were a small epic in which the enemy is plump and waddles away.
Imagery keeps the poem close to the soil. The “muddy half-moons” are at once homely and luminous, a visual reminder that the harvest is not the neat globe on the seed packet but something scarred and still worth keeping. The “wilted salad” shows the gardener using even the greens, making a meal from what she does have. That frugality turns into a form of reverence. The word “gifted” does important work: these beets are not exactly earned, since the gophers and weather decided the yield, yet they arrive as a kind of offering. The sentence “Nothing is better than gifted beetroot steamed, / Gopher bitten, she told herself, or otherwise” lets “gopher bitten” hover between the beet and the woman herself, as if both have been marked by the season’s losses. The final phrase “or otherwise” is deliberately casual; it carries the title’s whole philosophy, accepting the harvest exactly as it comes.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of false comfort. It does not pretend the seeds sprouted or that the gopher damage did not happen. It does not turn the garden into a neat moral. Instead, it pays attention to partial outcomes—the ones that thrived in flats, the roots left behind, the winter rediscovery—and calls them enough. For readers, that is a quietly useful wisdom: effort may not produce the expected result, but the bent, bitten, unexpected result can still be gathered, cooked, and received with thanks. The title phrase “or otherwise” becomes not an afterthought but a way of living with outcomes, one meal at a time.