Red Emma’s

“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 Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the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.

Jennifer Kabat’s diptych THE EIGHTH MOON and _NIGHTSHINING are being published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, and her essays have appeared in _Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, _and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. _She lives in rural upstate New York, serves in her local fire department and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA.

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche author, essayist, and curator. He’s the author (with Robert Warrior) of LIKE A HURRICANE: THE INDIAN MOVEMENT FROM ALCATRAZ TO WOUNDED KNEE (1995). His second book, EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT INDIANS IS WRONG, was published in 2009. Although Smith spends most of his time crafting game-changing exhibitions and texts, he also enjoys reading obsessively about the early days of the Soviet space program, watching massive amounts of televised sports, and writing about himself in the third person.