The Eighth Moon

Praise for 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.”—Chris Kraus, author of Summer of Hate “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  “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.”—Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven Is a Place on Earth