The Eighth Moon

“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.”

“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.”

“A mesmerizing debut that dares us to reimagine our relationship to time, place, and history. In this gripping book-length essay, chronologies converge when Jennifer Kabat finds herself in a rural county of the ancient Catskill Mountains ‘where the land itself holds time’: a nineteen century socialist uprising, a twentieth century movement of rural cooperatives, and a twenty-first century reckoning with the rising tide of facism, each offering unexpected echoes with one another’s emergencies. In prose that glides with poetic precision, Kabat’s personal narrative is webbed into this vortex as she situates herself in the broader story of Delaware County, cutting between the modernist hopes of her upbringing, the deathbeds of both her parents, and the shock of grief that shatters all previous understandings of time. Political and botanical textures emerge and remix as we roam through the last two centuries’ populist seasons. 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.”

“Kabat is a rural flaneur, probing for exit from 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.”

“Kabat traces her journey through the archives; outlines her experience making a home in Margaretville as she befriends locals; and issues abundant literary reflections on such writers as Elizabeth Hardwick and Adrienne Rich. […] an introspective investigation of the interplay between writing, history, and political action.”

“Kabat’s debut memoir unearths the history of the small Catskills town to which she relocated in 2005. 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.”

“In this first part of a diptych, 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.”