Bøker av Jennifer Kabat

A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control.Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-bloated stream and three-foot waves in her basement.This is far from the first—and hardly the worst—natural disaster to devastate her town. As Kabat dives deeper into the region’s fraught environmental history, she discovers it was more than once the site of Cold War weather experimentation. She traces connections between noctilucent clouds, man-made precipitation, and the 1950 Rainmaker’s Flood—finding unlikely characters along the way, including Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, a scientist at General Electric. And all the while she searches for ways to cope with the grief of her environmentalist father’s recent passing. “Because I need the water to speak to me too,” she writes.Curious and experimental, Nightshining uses place as the palimpsest of history, digging into questions of personal responsibility and planetary change. With “characteristically lyrical incision” (Marko Gluhaich), Kabat circles back to her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.

“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, identity” (Chris Kraus).When an ongoing illness refuses to resolve, Jennifer Kabat returns from London to Margaretville—a rural village in the Catskill Mountains, not far from where she grew up. As her body heals, she discovers meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron orange salamanders, grackles nesting in arborvitae, ash trees marked with orange blazes, a blood moon. Small patches of land begin to hold glimpses of the past—and of what is yet to come. “I feel, too, all the other people on the land, beating and breathing into this moment with me.”As her life in Margaretville expands, Kabat comes to know her socialist yet conservative neighbors and reflects on her unconventional upbringing, including the progressive politics her parents instilled in her at a young age. She also comes to find that the history of this region is steeped in trauma. Once home to merciless land barons who bound tenants to the land in perpetuity, Upstate New York—her very street—was the site of the Anti-Rent War of the 1800s, in which tenants revolted and blood was shed. Connectedness abounds in Kabat’s way of seeing: the former revolution and the political conditions of today, a wax plant that mysteriously ebbs and flows with her mother’s declining health and eventual passing. “Grief is strange,” she says. “Time blurs. The dead are alive and present.”“Kabat is both a stylist and a temporal magician,” (Adrian Shirk). Ambitious and expertly threaded, The Eighth Moon is at once a search for how to live in a place and an enigmatic lesson in a new kind of seeing—one where everything is connected, and all at once.