Hoarders — KATE DURBIN

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
An NPR Best Book of 2021
An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021
A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021

In Hoarders, Kate Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects our cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal and tender. In the absurdist tradition of Kafka and Beckett, Hoarders ultimately embraces with sympathy the difficulty and complexity of the human condition.

“Durbin’s work has what the A&E show lacks: a capacious sense of humanity, a nuanced understanding of how consumerism might shape compulsions, and a deeply expressed empathy for the subtleties of life under capitalism…In this reinvention, each character’s own narration takes precedence over the more salacious details of their disorder, bringing us into their personal, sometimes painful, worlds. Each poem consists of connected fragments, little piles. Each stanza reads like a conversation between the person and their stuff…The poems themselves are cluttered, yet their vibrancy is hard to overstate.” -Alyse Burnside, The Atlantic

“Durbin invites readers to consider how consumption shapes identity, and to entertain as reasonable the longing to hang on to every trivial item we acquire over the course of a lifetime, rather than joyfully KonMari-ing it all away….The book’s power, after all, is in the way it depicts a diversity of rituals and motives around consumption, and how it centers the pain of human relation in all of them.” - Amanda Montei, The Believer

“Television wants to provide a tidy narrative—dirty home transformed into clean home, sad changed to happy. But Durbin’s curations, inventions, and re-imaginings allow this material to transcend its form, and the result is a fascinating collection about connection, desire, and what it means to be American.” - Chelsea Hodson, Lit Hub

“In centering imperfect, struggling shopaholics more likely to amass cheap dresses from TJ Maxx than hit up Rodeo Drive, Durbin provides insight into the most dysfunctional realms of consumer culture.” ―Sandra Simonds, Poetry Foundation

“Hoarders is artfully material and moving…Durbin is careful not to imply that hoarding can be reduced to a single cause, or that hoarded objects don’t carry meaning; in fact, she seems to suggest that all items carry something with them, which hoarders assign meaning to. Capitalism remains functional because it’s able to convince us that items are meaningful until they become too old, too out of fashion, too outdated. There is a strange and eerie beauty in the tendency to attach memory to all strands of life and in the inability to cast something away because society claims it is useless…Durbin bluntly asks us: what does it mean to live in a culture that dooms every object and every person to obsolescence?” -Tryn Brown, Split the Lip

“Hoarders, Durbin’s newest collection, is a look at and through the documentary series of the same name, to the the secret life of American objects. It shows how we are formed with, by, and through our relationships with our stuff — which haunts and is haunted in equal measure. It is a powerful, beautiful, and deeply unsettling book.” - Kyle Williams, Full Stop

“Though the swift-moving spectacle of the television show invites viewers to cast easy judgment on these hoarders, Durbin employs poetry's slower speed to show a more complicated picture. Instead of using [their stories] to make us feel better about ourselves for not being hoarders, she indicts aspects of American culture we all participate in—religion, capitalism—and reveals our complicity, all the while dropping a lot of sight gags in the process.” - Rich Smith, The Stranger

“An absurd, bracingly funny depiction of the misery of consumerism—but also something tenderer, about the attachments that make up a life.” - Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2021

“Hoarders reckons with the collective alienation that is part of our culture. [It] is a striking union of cultural critique with poetic meditation. The poems here offer an unflinching view of a culture centered around consumption and spectacle, while imploring us to move with kindness through the world.” - CD Eskilson, The Arkansas International

“From what I presume is an abundance of hoarded material on the reality TV show, [Durbin] isolates these stunning and evocative tableaux that feel very moving, memento mori, and in a way treat the hoarded material with the care and dignity that many of the hoarders espouse.” -JoAnna Novak, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Durbin gives voice to her characters, using surrealism to inject humanity and tenderness into lives and stories that are often treated with disdain. Durbin reminds us that life under late capitalism is complicated. In 2021, who doesn’t need that?” -Electric Literature, Best Poetry Books of 2021

“Like another marvelous Wave book, Chelsey Minnis’s Baby, I Don’t Care, Durbin’s Hoarders is energized by the joyous singlemindedness of the poet and her subjects.” -David Starkey, California Review of Books

“It’s Durbin’s exquisitely fine-tuned attention that is thrown into new relief in Hoarders, a book that chronicles the lived experiences of people who cannot let go of things, and the things that “glow” under the attention of being witnessed and inventoried by Durbin’s vivid and heartbreaking renderings.” -Emily Skillings, The Believer

“Hoarders is as clear, focused, and blistering as [Durbin’s] artistry has ever been.” -Katharine Coldiron, BOMB

“It's by zooming into objects and slowing down time that Durbin makes her book so different from what you see on TV. In the show Hoarders, it can feel like the goal is to fix everyone really quickly, by the end of each episode. But with her poems, Durbin doesn't want to resolve anything for the reader. She simply wants to stop and listen to whatever the people and their objects have to say.” -Jeevika Verma, NPR: Morning Edition

“Jewel-like…[Hoarders] ditches both the exulting disgust and narrativizing sentimentality of reality TV, letting…love and selfishness live side by side in resplendent irrationality.” -Eleanor Stern, Rain Taxi

“…Hoarders is tender. Durbin’s poems encourage compassion not only for those she writes about, but for ourselves.” -Kate Cray, The Atlantic, Books Briefing: The Wellness Dystopia

“Durbin lays bare the American Dream as nightmare, and the links between trauma and capitalism, not turning away from the darker aspects of hoarding. But the book illuminates a new kind of aliveness as well, an unusual way of thinking about objects, and a sense of humanity that is beautifully complex.” -Amina Cain, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“I think a lot about shame, reading Hoarders, and pride. Some characters express embarrassment, or many do, while others are glad to have done something exceptional, unforgettable. Durbin approaches her subjects with graceful nonjudgement, an empathy that never slips into overwriting and erasing. She helps me imagine spaces beyond both shame and pride, where valuation is replaced with her luminous generosity, where abundance isn’t caught in the relentless trap of precarity, where salvation isn’t contingent on the fear of mortality, where what grows over the rot can grow freely and free.” -Laura Henriksen, The Poetry Project

“Hoarders deftly lifts moments from the commodified medium of reality TV…into a poetics that resists commodification or happy endings, as the objects don’t get swept away, decluttered, or judged. [The book] is filled with quietly acute moments where lack, fear, emptiness, and profound sadness bump up against objects…[Hoarders is]…surprising, musical and strange.” -Emmalea Russo, Tiding House

“Kate Durbin has taken the reality show Hoarders and distilled it into heartbreaking poetry. Durbin pairs interview fragments with descriptions of the items that suffocate the subjects' spaces, and her arrangements are magical. These are moving portraits of Americans attempting to heal trauma with consumption.” -Mike, Staff Picks, Skylight Books (Los Angeles)

“Language in Hoarders functions as arguably useful clutter…A language of memories, desires, ambitions, and dreams. Clutter becomes a way of reading/translating suffering….Hoarders‘ excess also expresses and explores a recognition of loss, regret, and even, at times, shame.” -Paul Cunningham, Action Yes!

“While a collection about reality TV could easily rest on solely humor or camp, Hoarders uses pop culture to arrive at deeper, more fascinating themes about humanity…” -Read Poetry

“A totally unique and haunting read.” -Maryse Miejer, Staff Picks, Exile in Booksville (Chicago)

“Using an interesting balance of first-person testimony set to an often dizzying and disturbing blend of descriptions of each hoarder’s stockpile of material afflictions, Hoarders feels borderline true-crime with its vivid portrayal of mental illness and loneliness.” -Michael Seidlinger’s Best Books on the Destruction of Public Space

“[Hoarders is] surprising and rich….By the end of the book, it feels impossible not to empathize with each person. They cease to be “other.” Even the title Hoarders seems to turn in on itself. “Hoarders” is a label we’ve given people, but the book really gives voice to the disenfranchised people society has collected and used up or ignored in any number of ways.” -Sunni Brown Wilkinson, The Southern Indiana Review

“A real artwork. A gem. Beautifully atmospheric. In their non-solution solutions for loneliness, disappointment, and the human condition, the hoarders are all of us. This one will stay with me.” -Melissa Broder

“Disturbing and moving. Some could not see the trouble they were in—feared only the city inspectors--some took great pleasure in their objects, some were ashamed. A fascinating journey that can be read in a night. Durbin feels the empathy and the horror simultaneously. A big emotional experience in just a few pages.” -Janet Fitch

“One of the most interesting collections of poems I’ve read in a long time…an incredibly unique and dynamic read. I no joke wept and laughed out loud to many of these. Totally brilliant.” -Devendra Banhart, The Creative Independent