In late 2024, I was interviewed by my publisher in Russia, Daniil Nebolsin of Soyapress, for the Russian translation of Hoarders, which included my Hoarders drawings for the first time. The interview came out in a Moscow magazine, and the English version is below.
Daniil: We can start with your illustrations. The Russian edition of Hoarders will differ from the English one because it will include your drawings. This is an amazing contribution! It is interesting and unusual that they illustrate the poems which are built upon a reality TV show, so we can see something like double cross-media translation here. It would be interesting to learn about your working process while preparing these drawings! And of course there is a more broad question about your interest in hybrid and mixed media artworks in your practice.
Kate: I’m grateful to you and the team at Soyapress for including my drawings in this edition!
At first I thought I would draw a “pile” for each poem, based on many objects from that poem, but then I realized drawing just a few key objects per poem was more in line with the spirit of the book. The poems are about emphasizing each object and its importance. So I created a kind of still life drawing for each, based on a few images from that poem. Some drawings were based on a single line, like “lizard crawling on a Jansport backpack.” Other drawings combine images from different parts of a poem, like Linda, the food hoarder, who has a Marcus Aurelius bust in her poem and also rotting fruit, which I placed together in my drawing. And a few of the illustrations only have one object, like Chuck’s drawing, which is an illustration of one of Chuck’s paintings. That one was interesting to draw because I actually went back to that episode of the reality show that the poem is based on and drew one of the paintings from the show. But for most of the drawings, I did not return to the show, and so the illustrations are very much this infinity mirror rippling out from the source material.
I have always liked moving from one medium to another, in order to gain new perspective or find unusual connections. I have a strong interest in taking something seen as non-literary or non-art, like kitsch products or a reality TV show, and making it into an artwork. I think this traces back to my sensory experiences as a child, how powerful mass produced toys and cliched Hollywood films were to me. I didn’t know then what was “art” and what was not, and I feel like as adults we compartmentalize the world in ways that can be flattening, where we miss the potency in what’s right in front of us. Sometimes this space between mediums can reveal.
Daniil: We are also very grateful for your readiness to present this crucial book to the Russian audience and for your inspiring enthusiasm in making this edition unique and close to the artist book format (it is hard to imagine such cases here and how). Personally, I really love this cross-medium work, and hope it will become more common for young poets and artists!
I also would like to ask what you think about the unique and distinguishing features of TV show as a medium itself? Are there some untranslatable but aesthetically/poetically relevant qualities of reality TV that attract you? For example, TV shows can be seen as a rather dense, overflowing and intense medium, especially if compared to “slow” and usually more tightly structured poetry and drawing. It would be interesting to know how you managed these differences while writing Hoarders – for example, if there were difficulties in putting some things aside or in the distinguishing of relevant features or source material from irrelevant/excessive ones.
Kate: My interest in reality TV has evolved a lot since social media and “digital life” have become our collective “reality.” I started writing about reality TV shows in 2010, so it’s been a decade and a half. I think I’m attracted to the medium because it’s weird. These low brow reality shows are not a true documentary. A reality TV show usually has a fairly rigid structure, and yet things fall apart from within that structure, which I find interesting. Reality TV is also highly performative, highlighting the performative nature of reality itself. I would consider Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, all these platforms to be reality TV-adjacent, although the role of the highly controlling producers on the reality shows is replaced on social media platforms by the rigidity of the algorithm.
The show Hoarders had its own attraction for me. It seemed almost impossible to write about due to the density of objects. This impossibility was a thrilling challenge. And the emotional component was also prohibitive for me, especially given my family’s history of hoarding and substance use disorder. I often wrote through a veil of tears. As you mentioned, poetry is a “slower” mode than TV, and I found this slower mode absolutely necessary to writing Hoarders. Poetry allowed me to reach into the hoard and pull out a single object and study it. To listen to a single line of dialogue and see how the object and the dialogue intertwined, and then to see the invisible glowing strands going out into the broader history of state violence in the US.
To distinguish what I was going to keep in a poem and what I was going to discard, my process was intuitive. I could have used any item in a person’s hoard because every object we own tells our story, but I didn’t want the reader to become exhausted or numbed. They needed to stay alive to the individual objects. And so I cut many objects and lines of dialogue. It wasn't that they were less good than what stayed, it was about the overall length and feel of the poem. And then another key thing I cut was the “fixing” part of the show’s structure, where they pretend to fix the hoarder at the end of the show and somewhat humiliate them (in my opinion). I found this part of the show highly false, it took away from the person’s story of what they’ve gone through and how they feel about their objects, and it obfuscates the failure of the social welfare state to care for individuals in distress.
Daniil: I totally understand your attitude towards those “fixing” parts of TV shows! I tried to find some Russian-language analogues of Hoarders show (at least some episodes from more broadly themed shows) and quickly noticed their rude didacticism – they barely have anything except moral critique and humiliating procedures of collective denunciation. For example, in our Male/Female talk-show, the hoarder is constantly interrupted, the people at the studio constantly express their pejorative attitude, and hoarding is treated as a moral fault opposing to “normalcy” (a quote from an entertainer, almost hysterically: “Do you understand that the normal person never needs this many things?”). By the way, this episode is called “Plyushkin’s Kids.” It would be interesting to learn about your experience of reading “Dead Souls” (which we talked about before) and how relatable it is to the contemporary representation of hoarding.
Kate: I'd be curious to watch those Russian-language shows! They sound similar to Hoarders, although on the Hoarders show they do show some care, and have a somewhat trauma-informed perspective. Something literature can do that psychological interventions usually don't do, though, is connect individual distress to broader social problems. Even if that's not the whole "reason" why someone does something like hoarding, of course. In Dead Souls, Plyushkin's hoarding can be tied to the greed of the aristocracy, to the existential crisis caused by a crumbling social order. In my book Hoarders, current US traumas such as bootstraps individualism, a lack of social welfare net, poor healthcare, endless wars, domestic violence - all these systemic issues are reflected in the different characters' hoards.
I don’t look at hoarding as inherently immoral in my poems, but rather as an understandable and in some ways tender (if impossible) way to cope with late capitalism. The idea that people might want to “rescue” objects in a culture where too many single-use items are created only to be thrown away makes sense to me. Rescuing an object becomes a proxy for rescuing a person in a culture where humans are seen also as objects, as disposable.
This leads me to loneliness. Plyushkin is an isolated person, and so are my characters. This loneliness contributes to their unique relationship with objects. The objects become something to cling to in the absence of human connection. A landowner in Russia in a time of serfdom where the old order is starting to crumble is not the same as a broke person trying to survive in late capitalism. And yet, these are all people surviving in times of great economic inequality, in cultures that value forms of accumulation, which separate people from one another. I think this is an interesting connection even if the places, times, and ways the books explore hoarding are very different.
Daniil: I totally agree, this connection of personal insecure sensitivity with broader problems is extremely important for the theme of hoarding! I think after publication of Hoarders in Russia it may be interesting to search for some complex texts or artworks about hoarding in post-USSR countries where people’s experience was very much shaped by deficit, permanent supply shortages and shocking clash with chaotic and snowballing wave of consumer culture in 90’s. Maybe this experience is more fear-driven: there are people who still preserve any commodity because they feel it may become inaccessible (and this fear reappears with every political or economic crisis). I also had a thought about possible postcolonial perspectives on hoarding – have you confronted them?
By the way, it would be interesting to learn about some examples from the visual/performance arts you find close to yours in Hoarders and to the idea of “rescuing” an object (for example, I visualized something in the style of Ashley Bickerton while reading the Ronnie poem).
Kate: It’s really compelling to consider Hoarders in relation to the USSR experience of privation and the clashing change of the post-USSR consumer experience.
Hoarders has a post-colonial perspective. I included objects in the poems that speak to the covering up of the ongoing violence toward, and the fetishization of the indigenous. These objects bump up against other objects that represent a history of state violence. For example Ronnie, who you mentioned, has totem poles in his yard, commodifying a First Nations object that embodies kinship. (Totem poles were considered a “paganistic threat” by Christian colonial settlers). And later in the poem the reader finds out Ronnie also has a replica of the Little Boy Atomic Bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima Japan at the end of World War 2, and the copy of NEWSWEEK that was published the day after Osama Bin Laden was killed, that just said DEAD across Bin Laden's face.
While Ronnie collects objects that give him a god-like feeling of ownership over US military interventionist events, and appropriative ownership over the living objects of others, other characters in the book also possess objects that point to a colonial history.
Marlena, the first character in the book, is a former fashion model from Topanga Canyon, an expensive area near Hollywood California, USA. She has experienced domestic violence, a recurring theme in the book–and she hoards dream catchers. Dream catchers (in certain circumstances) can be a romanticized cultural appropriation of a Native American object. Marlena has rainbow dream catchers alongside her organic Whole Foods items (Whole Foods is a high end grocery store in the US and Canada, recently bought by Amazon) and her Cost Plus World Market glitter elephant pillows.
The landscape of the poems becomes like an old battleground haunted by ghosts, where the current residents' disconnection from the land out of which objects and material "things" arise, and their loneliness and sadness connect all the way back to atrocities that occurred on the land they now occupy. Although it's only one part of their story, of course. I keep mentioning that because in Hoarders it was important for me not to suggest a direct cause-and-effect relationship between a character's hoarding and one particular trauma, either personal or socio-political or historical.
Daniil: This post-colonial dimension of Hoarders is exciting and your explication will be very fruitful for our readers! It is important to discuss post-colonial themes in tangible, small-scale terms, as a form of relating to objects as well. As a further supporting example I remembered anthropologist Roy Wagner’s discussion of “object strategies” as utilized by subalterns: these are the cases when people use silence to become more like an object than like an active subject, and this paradoxically helps them to become less governable (for example, he mentions silent detainees refusing to speak their name, so without the proper identification it is impossible to deport them). One of the striking aspects of Hoarders is that the book problematizes the multiplicity of our relations to objects beyond the familiar dialectics of possession/dispossession that is common for the “classical” critique of consumer culture.
I also love how your comment highlights the density and multilayered nature of this text! Techniques used in it are not always familiar for Russian readers: among some remotely related examples are “Holocaust” by Charles Reznikoff and “Verdicts” by Lida Yusupova, both focused on the poetic rendition of legal texts, plus there are some examples of documentary poetry (especially based on speech). It may be useful to learn about how Hoarders relate to conceptual writing, found text/found art, readymade or documentary poetry (as exemplified by Reznikoff, Heimrad Bäcker or more contemporary examples). Do you think of your work as a development of some of these traditions?
Kate: I realized I forgot to answer your question about artists who rescue found objects. Mike Kelley is a favorite, with his stuffed animal sculptures that speak to repressed childhood trauma and also critique consumer culture. It’s interesting, when writing Hoarders, I started to feel that hoarder homes have a quality that feels like art: irrational, impractical, visceral, combining unlike things together, making surprising connections. And, like a lot of art, a hoarded home doesn’t fit neatly into the values of capitalism, because a hoarded home displays the things that are meant to be hidden, the trash and the broken things and the decay. I don’t mean to conflate the two–hoarding and art–as they are different in important ways, but I did notice this parallel.
Other people have categorized my work as documentary poetry, and I am fine with that label. I think it fits with the extreme specificity that interests me, the particular details of a time and a place. I also like the–almost funniness?--of calling my book about a reality tv show documentary poetry, since one of my intentions has always been to turn the reality show into what it might have been, had it been a documentary instead of a reality TV show. A documentary is obsessed with what-is, and that is true of my practice. It’s why I include the exact name of a candle: Cherries on Snow Yankee Candle.
I feel more of a connection with Oulipo than I do with the readymade or conceptual writing. I definitely owe a debt to Perec’s work. I love creating forms and working with constraints. But I really don’t connect with the “idea over execution” aspect of conceptual writing at all. The major practitioners of conceptual writing here in the US even doubt whether “writing” exists at all. I realize they are questioning the nature of writing in a digital age, and that is a valuable inquiry (and they are being cheeky), but it just isn’t what I’m curious about in my work. (Speaking of conceptual writing, I think Holocaust, which you mentioned, is an amazing text, one of the best of the genre). For me, a lot of actual writing goes into my books. It takes years to take down my notes from the reality show that I then craft into my poems, and the book is very much an altered thing - written through my perspective.
I appreciate this observation you made: “One of the striking aspects of Hoarders is that the book problematizes the multiplicity of our relations to objects beyond the familiar dialectics of possession/dispossession that is common for the “classical” critique of consumer culture.” For me, the poem’s form, where the dialogue runs into the objects, allowed me to do this. Now I am thinking of Oulipo again, and how much those writers have given to me, because the form allowed me to change my relationship to objects. Through the form of the poems I came to better understand that objects are mysterious, that they hold many possibilities at once. Now, I have come to almost an animistic view of objects.
This leads me back to your interesting observation about Roy Wagner’s object strategies. You brought up the human subject-as-object, as that of course is the other side of the coin in Hoarders. How a person can become a thing, in a society that sees both people and objects as disposable, how seeing "things" as trash leads to seeing people as discardable once they are no longer "useful" or if they are "broken." And I was thinking about what you said about subalterns, and their radical silence, and that made me think of how hoarders often see both people and objects as having inherent value, how there is something radical about holding onto that truth under capitalism, although of course I don't want to erase the mental illness or compulsive aspect of hoarding disorder, it's not a choice in many ways, it's not a political stance, but there is a truth inside it that feels political.
Daniil: It is interesting to track how differently the various approaches related to found/documentary art treat their mediums. I would like to mention “Novels in Three Lines” by Félix Fénéon (we hope to release it in Russian in 2025) and both visual and textual works by Bern Porter (they often have some almost animistic effects too) as both playful and intensive examples that are associated with “Hoarders” for me.
During our conversation you mentioned many layers and implications within “Hoarders”, from pop-cultural to political ones, I am sure that there are more layers to uncover, and it would be interesting to ask what you think about possible reading strategies for this book. This is a self-consciously naïve question, but it may be helpful to know if this book welcomes both “high-brow” and “untrained”, inspecting and imaginative forms of reading experience, and if readers can find some clues in non-poetic cultural phenomena such as fan-fiction.
It also would be great to learn about some authors, publishers or books you liked recently! Such lists are always very helpful, since young and experimental English-language literature is scarcely reviewed in Russia and emerging distinctive things are easy to miss.
Kate: Regarding reading strategies, I hope readers will find Hoarders immediately accessible, and that some readers, if they like, might linger to find those layers that you speak of. I like books that slip down easily while also holding a lot to unpack for a willing reader. Each object in Hoarders has meaning beyond the personal, beyond the individual the poem is centered on. Each object has a haunted history that can be excavated if the reader wants to go there. The individual arrangements of objects in each line are that way too--they have a relationship to each other that can be meditated upon. The book is like a big Hieronymous Bosch painting in a way, with small scenes throughout that you can look at up close, or at a distance, and see different things. But it’s also perfectly acceptable to read the poems quickly, experiencing their moods without lingering.
I don’t mind if someone applies a fan fiction lens to reading Hoarders, if it's relevant or interesting to them. I do see my work as very different from fan fiction - there’s no sense of fantasy. I’m going deeper into what’s already there. I could be wrong but I also think fan fiction generally applies to fictional worlds, and while Hoarders the show has invented and controlled elements, it’s about real people’s lives. I suppose my work is similar to fan fiction in that I change the format of the reality TV show, which is me changing the "invented" or - in my opinion - false or unsatisfying part of the show. I'm thinking again of how I remove the "fixing the hoarders" part at the end of each episode, and end my poems on the hoarder's story, on lingering uncertainty.
(Also I want to say that I like that fan fiction exists, I like that people are writing on top of or into existing narrative worlds.)
As for writers making interesting work right now in the US, I love the work being published by Dorothy project, a small press based in St Louis Missouri, USA. In some ways Dorothy reminds me of Soyapress in their selection of translated experimental works in addition to work by US writers. Dorothy is run by writer Danielle Dutton, whose own book Prairie Dresses Art Other came out from Coffee House Press last year and is excellent, these stories that feel like poems that are also essays and art installations. Last year I also loved Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed, a memoir about her experience being institutionalized for depression in the 90s and how writing saved her. It’s a memoir, but its form is slippery, and her sentences are gorgeous. I love some of the recent Semiotext(e) books: Nate Lippens' My Dead Book, which is a beautiful book about being queer, working class, and mourning ones dead friends, and the ingenious Selected Amazon Reviews, by sadly departed New Narrative San Francisco writer, the magnificent Kevin Killian. I wrote about Amazon Reviews before it was a book, when it was just a project on Amazon, for an art magazine called Art in America some six years ago or so. I feel such a kinship with this project, which gathers over 600 of Kevin’s reviews of Amazon products over the course of almost two decades. Some of his Amazon reviews are reviews of books but some are just random products like a wallet clip or a roll of duct tape and he treats them with such reverence, like they are people. I also loved Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch, which has been translated fairly widely at this point, I think, so maybe it has already come out in Russian. Scanlan interviewed an equestrian about her life on the horse race track, transcribed it, and then turned it into this spare, hard (yet somehow also soft) jewel of a book. My good friend Stephen van Dyck’s People I’ve Met From the Internet is another brilliant book which deserves greater readership. He ingeniously catalogues his queer coming of age in online spaces like AOL chatrooms, and is in the form of an annotated list based on actual spreadsheets he kept at the time.