Jennifer Kabat

Dec 13, 2024 | nyra.nyc | Jennifer Kabat

I’m a fan of NYRA, Catty Corner, Eric Schwartau—and beavers (see “The Beautiful and the Damned,” #42). Obviously, you must cover North America’s largest rodent in depth and often. (They are way better than rats IMHO. I could go on about the financial impact they had in building New York City and Albany, which began as a beaver trading post.) Beavers, though, aren’t just architects but landscape architects with nearly as big an impact on our continent as humankind.

Oct 3, 2024 | 4columns.org | Jennifer Kabat

Native Prospects Jennifer Kabat At the historic house of Hudson River School–founder Thomas Cole, contemporary works by Indigenous artists present alternative worldviews of landscape and place. Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, installation view. Courtesy Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo: Peter Aaron. Pictured, left: Thomas Cole, Solitary Lake in New Hampshire, 1830. Oil on canvas. Right: Teresa Baker, Forest, 2019. Willow, yarn, spray paint, and buffalo sinew on AstroTurf.

Jul 8, 2024 | nytimes.com | Jennifer Kabat

I love weeds because I am a bad gardener, and I am a bad gardener because I cannot weed. The work seems violent. What might I kill or cut off? I also cannot mow. Haphazard paths crisscross my yard, enough to avoid ticks, and the vegetable beds are full of plants most people would call weeds: docks, dandelions, broadleaf plantain and mallow. Just how a plant is designated a weed and not an herb or a flower involves complex histories of medicine, food, language and migration.

Jun 5, 2024 | memoirland.substack.com | Jennifer Kabat

We come because I am sick. I have chronic fatigue. Impossible exhaustion. In London where my husband and I lived, I toured the offices of environmental doctors, in their name a promise to treat something so global it’s everywhere all the time, as if my sickness is everything. And, for me it was, it was the city and the air itself. My first week living in the UK, I broke out in a rash. It was from detergent but could seem to be the move itself. I went there to live with my husband.

May 28, 2024 | electricliterature.com | Kristjana Gunnars |Sheila Heti |Jennifer Kabat

In high school I read Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. My copy is dog-eared with outlines of lips I drew on the cover and inside there are countless underlines in my teenaged scrawl. In the poems, Rich quotes from archives, weaving women’s letters and diaries to “stitch” (her word) a way to be then. (Her then was 1980s and still second-wave feminism trying to recover women’s voices).