Hoarders
By Kate Durbin
Publication Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN# 9781950268139 (5.5 x 8.25, 184pp, paperback)
ISBN# 9781950268146 (5.5 x 8.25, 184pp, limited edition hardcover)
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In Hoarders, 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 a 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.
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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.”
—NPR Morning Edition, Jeevika Verma
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
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Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, the Believer, BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.
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