“Kabat is a rural flaneur, probing for exit from the Capitalist endgame in this psychogeographical memoir of the Catskills. As political time collapses the events of her study into the present day, mysterious doors open into the possibility of an encounter across history with every risk attached, including that of renewal of our most elusive faith in one another. This is a sublime book.”
Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, identity. It’s one of the most remarkable, original books I’ve read in a long time.”
Chris Kraus
“The Eighth Moon is infused with attention for the lands and art and bodies of the world. Reading it gave me moral stamina. Jennifer Kabat is a capacious and humane writer, and this book is required reading for anyone who wishes to live a principled life in a modern world.”
Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still with You
“The Eighth Moon moves with time-skipping logic, ‘where the yet is always now,’ and where life is not a march of progress, but rather a circadian unfurling, dying back, going underground, and coming up again, slightly different. Kabat is both a stylist and a temporal magician. She cultivates a perspective that is as ethical as it is aesthetic because it provides a way of understanding ourselves not as main characters, but as dynamic collaborators with all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.”
Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven Is a Place on Earth
The New York Times magazine - Why Weeds Are Worth Reconsidering
Reviews
“Jennifer Kabat’s psychogeographical memoir of the Catskills finds hope for our current crises in rural communities and historical uprisings”
“To expect a memoir and open to a scene out of the 1845 Anti-Rent War is surreal and unmooring. Yet that feeling of being unbalanced permeates The Eighth Moon, Jennifer Kabat’s luminous book which seeks to make sense of family, politics, and land today through the lens of the past.”
“Kabat writes with characteristically lyrical incision about her Catskills community in upstate New York, its historic, farmer-led ‘Anti-Rent War’ and her parents’ own interests in collectivity.”
“The ancient spell of Pakatakan Mountain, the struggles of ordinary folk, and the contrasts of modern-day Margaretville frame this lyrical and transcendent memoir.”
“The site of a 19th-century rural populist uprising, and now home to a colorful cast of characters, the Appalachian community becomes a lens through which Kabat explores political, economic, and ecological issues, mining the archives and the work of such writers as Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick along the way.”
“1845. The sky is blue, yet all is brown. I picture the scene from overhead: a silvered steel of violence, blood, beer, whiskey, and mutton. High, skidding clouds skip with excitement, eager to see what unfolds below. They cheer on the scene where men in dresses march.”
A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills in 2005, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. Prompted to leave London following a mysterious illness that seems to be caused by life in the city itself, she finds in these ancient mountains—at once the northernmost part of Appalachia and a longtime refuge for New Yorkers—a place “where the land itself holds time.”
She forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes, finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land. As the Great Recession sets in and a housing crisis looms, she supports herself with freelance work and adjunct teaching, slowly learning of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.
Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.
The Eighth Moon is half of a diptych, the second volume Nightshining is out May 6, 2025.