Hoarders

Kate Durbin’s Hoarders is an arresting exploration of compulsion, accumulation, and the emotional weight of objects. She creates an intimacy that transcends typical poetic abstraction, allowing the emotions and struggles of her subjects to resonate deeply. Her work isn’t just poetic in form but in its ability to convey truth and experience through vivid, often painful snapshots of life.
Shane Jesse Christmass, X-Ray Lit Magazine

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

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

It is a powerful, beautiful, and deeply unsettling book.
Kyle Williams, Full Stop

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.
JoAnna Novak, The Los Angeles 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

Durbin’s new poetry collection, Hoarders (Wave Books) is as clear, focused, and blistering as her artistry has ever been.
Katharine Coldiron, BOMB

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 [these 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

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.
Alyse Burnside, The Atlantic

You might think that a book composed mostly of short quotes from hoarders juxtaposed against the things they collect would quickly wear thin. However,...Durbin’s Hoarders is energized by the joyous singlemindedness of the poet and her subjects.
David Starkey, California Review of Books

Hoarders 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