What do you think?
Rate this book
Hoarders
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.
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.
184 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 4, 2021
13 people are currently reading
2816 people want to read
About the author
Kate Durbin
9 books85 followersKate Durbin is a writer and artist from Los Angeles, California. Her books include Hoarders (Wave Books), E! Entertainment (Wonder), The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and ABRA (1913 Press). ABRA is also an iOS app that is "a living text," which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature. In 2015 and in 2020, she was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia.
Kate's writing has been published in Art in America, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Flaunt, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her website is www.katedurbin.la.
Kate's writing has been published in Art in America, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Flaunt, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her website is www.katedurbin.la.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
June 17, 2021
Disturbing and moving poetic dialogue between internal life and external reality, the narrative of people who hoard a myriad of objects and a literal, cold eyed description of the physical situation. Each person begins to describe their predicament, their situation, and the sentence is finished by a list of objects, some in an insane level of decrepitude and repulsiveness. I was relieved to get to the book hoarders!
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, can be read in a night. Durbin feels the empathy and the horror simultaneously. A big emotional experience in just a few pages. In some ways I was reminded of Perec's Life a User's Manual, his description of the contents of the rooms in a Parisian apartment building. But, watching the TV show Hoarders and taking careful notes, Durbin can't create character through object as freely as Perec could in his fiction--it's the juxtaposition of what they say and what she sees that provides the emotional impact.
Here's "Linda":
Food is like creativity and possibilities in life jar of old nuts with bugs
My kitchen has all kinds of wonderful molds, a Mongolian fireboat, got that bag of sugar with mice in it
"
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, can be read in a night. Durbin feels the empathy and the horror simultaneously. A big emotional experience in just a few pages. In some ways I was reminded of Perec's Life a User's Manual, his description of the contents of the rooms in a Parisian apartment building. But, watching the TV show Hoarders and taking careful notes, Durbin can't create character through object as freely as Perec could in his fiction--it's the juxtaposition of what they say and what she sees that provides the emotional impact.
Here's "Linda":
Food is like creativity and possibilities in life jar of old nuts with bugs
My kitchen has all kinds of wonderful molds, a Mongolian fireboat, got that bag of sugar with mice in it
"
April 25, 2021
A real artwork. A gem. Durbin accomplishes this beautifully:
“Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.” -Milan Kundera
Not a novel but you know what I mean.
Beautifully atmospheric. This one will stay with me a while.
In their non-solution solutions for loneliness, disappointment, and the human condition, the hoarders are all of us.
“Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.” -Milan Kundera
Not a novel but you know what I mean.
Beautifully atmospheric. This one will stay with me a while.
In their non-solution solutions for loneliness, disappointment, and the human condition, the hoarders are all of us.
June 15, 2021
Growing up, I assumed everyone had a relative with a house falling in on itself. Towers of regret in the form of clothes, books, furniture. A history of holding on. I listened to the arguments and never could process the cause or the problem or the reason. It was years later when I learned my grandmother had received a letter from her son while he was fighting in Vietnam. The letter was accidentally misplaced and she thought another would come so she moved on. Then he stepped on a bomb and another letter never arrived. After that, how do you throw anything away? What significance might that item hold to a last memory? Or a lost person?
These poems so perfectly capture the clutter of the home and the clutter of the mind.
These poems so perfectly capture the clutter of the home and the clutter of the mind.
May 4, 2021
a visceral, painful book that shows grace and care while depicting people who hoard for a litany of reasons. this is not the TV show, this is found poetry at its finest.
May 5, 2021
"This connects to an anxiety I’ve had since childhood about wanting to record everything that’s ever happened, which is perhaps simply a fear of my own mortality, as well as the mortality of everything in this beautiful world."
From an interview on Full Stop! https://www.full-stop.net/2021/05/05/...
From an interview on Full Stop! https://www.full-stop.net/2021/05/05/...
December 11, 2021
I wouldn’t call myself a poetry aficionado, but this is a work of art. I find hoarding to be disturbing, but fascinating (“Hoarders” is too unsettling for me to watch). The author has an empathetic focus on hoarders and what drives their behavior, rather than on sensationalizing their act of hoarding.
November 4, 2025
I wrote this book! Here are some things I said about it in conversation with Niina Pollari for The American Poetry Review:
-"The structure of the reality TV show Hoarders is kind of sneaky. Like, we can get away with othering this person on the show as long as we usher the viewer into a happy ending where we “fix” the individual. In my Hoarders poems, I didn’t want to judge the show on the page, necessarily, but I did want to do something different than the show--to linger on the crisis of the present to consider why this person is in trouble in the first place, and what are the larger systemic failures that leave so many people isolated with no support in this country. I believe that empathy can arise naturally through a process of understanding, but it takes a lot of time to really understand something. As someone who comes from a family with hoarding and substance use, I find loving my family involves embracing discomfort, and uncertainty, in an ongoing way. "
-"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 relationship to the USA 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 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.
As for how I chose which threads to follow in the book, it might sound strange, but it was really through meditating on the objects themselves. The deeper I went into the invisible threads between the person and the objects, the more I found. The choosing process was intuitive, but at the same time, each image and object has layers of meaning and association, and therefore none are arbitrary."
-"Usually I come to a form through an idea, or to be more precise, it’s like the two things come as a part of a whole. Hoarders had to be poetry because it is all about creating these forms with language: dialogue and the language of objects, woven together. The form became a way for me to explore the relationship between people and objects without one overtaking or dominating the other. Instead of the world being divided up into distinct and hard categories (animal, plant, object), the form allowed me to explore the ways in which we are a part of our environment, and it is a part of us.
I also didn't want the objects to only be representational, to only carry that person's traumatic history or American history...I also wanted them to be fundamentally unknowable in a way. I wanted there to be a kind of objectness that was de-centering the human a little bit. Part of why it's important the the people and the objects share each line equally is to show these objects not just as "background" or environment."
-I’m definitely an immersive person with anything that I make, but especially with writing about reality TV. My friend, the poet Emily Skillings, told me I “inhabit” the shows I write about, and I love that way of putting it. So initially I watched and re-watched the show, generating pages and pages of notes, although the actual poem-writing process was intuitive and not obedient to the notes. It was all emotional; both the watching and the writing.
Beyond that, my thinking in Hoarders is catalyzed by a lot of reading I’d done on trauma. Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD, which considers the link between trauma and mental illness. Also the work of Mark Fisher, his idea of the privatization of distress in the US. Writing against the pathologizing of individuals in a country that has such a long wounded history (colonization, genocide, various wars, even consumerism itself) was important to me. Which leads me to David Smail, whose book The Origins of Unhappiness, really radicalized my thinking around mental illness. He was a proponent of the social materialist view of distress, which basically boils down to the idea that individuals cannot be separated from their environment. We are deeply affected by society. And so, if it is sick, society can contribute to a state of distress in individuals that can be genuinely too powerful to overcome alone. But while these thinkers catalyzed me, these ideas are also just how I see the world now, so the writing process for the poems was instinctive, fluid...not like trying to prove a theory of anything."
-"On the book jacket, the description links between hoarding and collective US traumas such as consumerism and the devastation of the environment, but those aren't the only collective traumas the book deals with. I just didn't want to include a laundry list on the cover! But Hoarders deals just as much with domestic violence, the long arm of colonization, the straitjacket of gender roles, the military industrial complex, etc. These haunted histories manifest on both a personal level and as ambient horror in the book. You can see them in individual objects and in the dialogue, if you look carefully."
And here are links to more reviews and conversations about the book. You can also read more on my website: www.katedurbin.la
Review by Alyse Burnside in the Atlantic: https://shorturl.at/nFDCf
Review by Amanda Montei in The Believer: https://shorturl.at/xvQgg
Review by Tryn Brown in Split Lit: https://shorturl.at/bdGCX
Conversation with Kyle Williams in Full Stop: https://shorturl.at/porKt
Conversation with JoAnna Novak in LARB: https://shorturl.at/eFD38
-"The structure of the reality TV show Hoarders is kind of sneaky. Like, we can get away with othering this person on the show as long as we usher the viewer into a happy ending where we “fix” the individual. In my Hoarders poems, I didn’t want to judge the show on the page, necessarily, but I did want to do something different than the show--to linger on the crisis of the present to consider why this person is in trouble in the first place, and what are the larger systemic failures that leave so many people isolated with no support in this country. I believe that empathy can arise naturally through a process of understanding, but it takes a lot of time to really understand something. As someone who comes from a family with hoarding and substance use, I find loving my family involves embracing discomfort, and uncertainty, in an ongoing way. "
-"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 relationship to the USA 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 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.
As for how I chose which threads to follow in the book, it might sound strange, but it was really through meditating on the objects themselves. The deeper I went into the invisible threads between the person and the objects, the more I found. The choosing process was intuitive, but at the same time, each image and object has layers of meaning and association, and therefore none are arbitrary."
-"Usually I come to a form through an idea, or to be more precise, it’s like the two things come as a part of a whole. Hoarders had to be poetry because it is all about creating these forms with language: dialogue and the language of objects, woven together. The form became a way for me to explore the relationship between people and objects without one overtaking or dominating the other. Instead of the world being divided up into distinct and hard categories (animal, plant, object), the form allowed me to explore the ways in which we are a part of our environment, and it is a part of us.
I also didn't want the objects to only be representational, to only carry that person's traumatic history or American history...I also wanted them to be fundamentally unknowable in a way. I wanted there to be a kind of objectness that was de-centering the human a little bit. Part of why it's important the the people and the objects share each line equally is to show these objects not just as "background" or environment."
-I’m definitely an immersive person with anything that I make, but especially with writing about reality TV. My friend, the poet Emily Skillings, told me I “inhabit” the shows I write about, and I love that way of putting it. So initially I watched and re-watched the show, generating pages and pages of notes, although the actual poem-writing process was intuitive and not obedient to the notes. It was all emotional; both the watching and the writing.
Beyond that, my thinking in Hoarders is catalyzed by a lot of reading I’d done on trauma. Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD, which considers the link between trauma and mental illness. Also the work of Mark Fisher, his idea of the privatization of distress in the US. Writing against the pathologizing of individuals in a country that has such a long wounded history (colonization, genocide, various wars, even consumerism itself) was important to me. Which leads me to David Smail, whose book The Origins of Unhappiness, really radicalized my thinking around mental illness. He was a proponent of the social materialist view of distress, which basically boils down to the idea that individuals cannot be separated from their environment. We are deeply affected by society. And so, if it is sick, society can contribute to a state of distress in individuals that can be genuinely too powerful to overcome alone. But while these thinkers catalyzed me, these ideas are also just how I see the world now, so the writing process for the poems was instinctive, fluid...not like trying to prove a theory of anything."
-"On the book jacket, the description links between hoarding and collective US traumas such as consumerism and the devastation of the environment, but those aren't the only collective traumas the book deals with. I just didn't want to include a laundry list on the cover! But Hoarders deals just as much with domestic violence, the long arm of colonization, the straitjacket of gender roles, the military industrial complex, etc. These haunted histories manifest on both a personal level and as ambient horror in the book. You can see them in individual objects and in the dialogue, if you look carefully."
And here are links to more reviews and conversations about the book. You can also read more on my website: www.katedurbin.la
Review by Alyse Burnside in the Atlantic: https://shorturl.at/nFDCf
Review by Amanda Montei in The Believer: https://shorturl.at/xvQgg
Review by Tryn Brown in Split Lit: https://shorturl.at/bdGCX
Conversation with Kyle Williams in Full Stop: https://shorturl.at/porKt
Conversation with JoAnna Novak in LARB: https://shorturl.at/eFD38
July 31, 2021
An inquiry into the pathologies and psychology of hoarding, that provides a more nuanced portrayal of hoarders than any reality TV show could. Each poem is a monologue from a hoarder juxtaposed with a snapshot of their environment, making this collection read less like cryptic poetry and more like a cinematic documentary. A brilliant idea deftly executed.
August 15, 2021
hard to read but so well done
December 31, 2021
I sat down and read this in one sitting, while in a hunger for Ashbery’s Some Trees.
Durbin’s work here is that of the skilled director of an ethnography. Dialogue interspersed with images of the things people have hoarded. Sometimes the two blend to form uncommon sentences, sometimes they explicate each other. It sounds simple but when done over the length of a book, with different homes and different characters, it’s virtuosic.
The lines are shocking, illuminating and endlessly new.
Hoarding is a lovely theme for poetry — poets are often hoarders of language. But here, actual, real-life stuff hoarders get a chance to talk around their issues. And for the most part they know why they hoard — it’s not lack of knowledge stopping them from getting better. It’s the deepening pit of habit, security and the rivers of the mind.
Maybe I’m particularly enthused because I’m both a poet and an ethnographer, but for the love of America, just perfectly executed.
Durbin’s work here is that of the skilled director of an ethnography. Dialogue interspersed with images of the things people have hoarded. Sometimes the two blend to form uncommon sentences, sometimes they explicate each other. It sounds simple but when done over the length of a book, with different homes and different characters, it’s virtuosic.
The lines are shocking, illuminating and endlessly new.
Hoarding is a lovely theme for poetry — poets are often hoarders of language. But here, actual, real-life stuff hoarders get a chance to talk around their issues. And for the most part they know why they hoard — it’s not lack of knowledge stopping them from getting better. It’s the deepening pit of habit, security and the rivers of the mind.
Maybe I’m particularly enthused because I’m both a poet and an ethnographer, but for the love of America, just perfectly executed.
April 12, 2022
My latest poetry reading experiment is in itself an experiment.
What is it with people’s obsession with hoarders? Is it a uniquely American thing? Seriously, readers from other countries please weigh in on this, I’d love to know.
Americans are obsessed with hoarders. TV shows weren’t enough…now there’s an entire book of poetry about it. Wow. Ok.
To be fair, it is conceptually interesting and original. The book, not the hoarding – hoarding is a tragic mental disorder that needs to be taken care of, not sensationalized or televised for mindless pleasure of the reality tv addicted.
The book tells stories of different lives structured so that it’s done in people’s own words and through their (numerous) possessions. Each story is its own tragedy, but some are more than others. It varies from genuine mental instability to trauma to pure indulgence. All of it is sad and all of it is out of control.
From a purely fictional storytelling perspective, it’s an interesting way to present life as a snapshot or a sketch – think found art exhibit, of sorts.
But then, when you really think about it, there’s something pruriently exploitative about it, much the same way the tv shows are.
Or I don’t know, maybe it’s art. The way a toilet can be if you say it is. Maybe this is the way to have a discourse on American life, through this grotesque collision of psychological trauma and out-of-control consumerism. It’s certainly a spectacle either way. And apparently, an award worthy one at that. Now count your joy sparklers and all that, rethink all you own…does it own you in return?
What is it with people’s obsession with hoarders? Is it a uniquely American thing? Seriously, readers from other countries please weigh in on this, I’d love to know.
Americans are obsessed with hoarders. TV shows weren’t enough…now there’s an entire book of poetry about it. Wow. Ok.
To be fair, it is conceptually interesting and original. The book, not the hoarding – hoarding is a tragic mental disorder that needs to be taken care of, not sensationalized or televised for mindless pleasure of the reality tv addicted.
The book tells stories of different lives structured so that it’s done in people’s own words and through their (numerous) possessions. Each story is its own tragedy, but some are more than others. It varies from genuine mental instability to trauma to pure indulgence. All of it is sad and all of it is out of control.
From a purely fictional storytelling perspective, it’s an interesting way to present life as a snapshot or a sketch – think found art exhibit, of sorts.
But then, when you really think about it, there’s something pruriently exploitative about it, much the same way the tv shows are.
Or I don’t know, maybe it’s art. The way a toilet can be if you say it is. Maybe this is the way to have a discourse on American life, through this grotesque collision of psychological trauma and out-of-control consumerism. It’s certainly a spectacle either way. And apparently, an award worthy one at that. Now count your joy sparklers and all that, rethink all you own…does it own you in return?
September 4, 2021
Maybe it’s a gimmick but it’s one that ends up curating the experience of watching the reality show, managing to delve into the ways it reflects aspects of American culture that we all feel compelled by in our weaker moments. The removal of visuals and audio forces the reader to visualize, requiring the mining our own experiences, people we have met, and lifestyles we have witnessed, leaving us with the realization we have always known these compulsions, even if we’ve never felt them with the intensity these people do. It’s no longer poetry, but exhibit.
August 18, 2023
I haven’t read anything as equally strange and tender and devastating as this in a long time.
June 19, 2021
A simple format—*spoken words* next to the things of the speaker—with haunting, funny, intensely illustrative results.
The book is an accumulation of prose poems inspired by the TV show, and they read like a screenplay, like voiceover on static shots, portraits of deeply traumatized and disturbed Americans, illness festering into thingorrhea, an innocuous cancer pouring uncontainably across the room, down the hallway, into the yard, visitors Stay Away! implicitly
my fav was probably the last, Maggie from Ogden Utah, who is simultaneously cursed by demons and unremitting loneliness, trapped in a house where she mustn’t open certain rooms or boxes, grasping at memories literally contained as vaccuumed up dust. The last line: “*There’s definitely war on earth between good and evil* dust billowing up from the ground; a shadow moving in the window”
The book is an accumulation of prose poems inspired by the TV show, and they read like a screenplay, like voiceover on static shots, portraits of deeply traumatized and disturbed Americans, illness festering into thingorrhea, an innocuous cancer pouring uncontainably across the room, down the hallway, into the yard, visitors Stay Away! implicitly
my fav was probably the last, Maggie from Ogden Utah, who is simultaneously cursed by demons and unremitting loneliness, trapped in a house where she mustn’t open certain rooms or boxes, grasping at memories literally contained as vaccuumed up dust. The last line: “*There’s definitely war on earth between good and evil* dust billowing up from the ground; a shadow moving in the window”
July 16, 2021
I love the whole concept of this book. I'm a fan of show. I pretty much exalt in ephemera but at times, of course, it can be oppressive. Of course. The merging poetry and voices from the show participants (some of whom are extremely memorable to me) seemed to capture a level of analysis that starts on the page, but doesn't even live there. Basically this book is amazing and does A LOT of work all while being so mesmerizing. I just loved it so much. And I've already read it twice. And I'll probably read it again. Not just because I'm a fan of the show, but also because I am a fan of Kate Durbin.
June 25, 2021
At first I thought it was supposed to be funny. Then it got scary. Then it got sad. Then I realized it was actually kind of brilliant. It was very unique in conveying the subject of hoarding. It would have a person being interviewed like the show hoarders, but their sentence would be interrupted by an insane list items that they had been hoarding. Very short and simple “poem book” but I really enjoyed it. I think others may find it weird but I enjoy learning about weird or different and taboo subjects.
April 4, 2022
As a person who strongly detests TV that enables viewers to get off on other people's suffering, I am taken aback by how much I LOVED this book. All of the poems are based on episodes from A&E's Hoarders , a show that occasionally reminds me of the house I grew up in. Durbin's ability to hold people's underbellies and their belongings within the same stanzas is truly eye-opening.
August 10, 2021
I started off a poetry and short story reading summer with this collection. A dazzler, heartbreaking, alive.
January 6, 2022
Brilliant topic and writing style. I don’t often read pieces that elicit “disgust” but this did. Beautiful.
January 24, 2022
Absolutely a favorite. Highlights the intersection of people and objects in such a sympathetic manner. More to come.
June 9, 2025
This had quite the impact on me. Personal history, if you know you know.
I didn't know how this came to be, I wondered if Durbin had interviewed these people. Because that's what it sounded like. Like true statements uttered by people going living as hoarders. After I learnt that she took the spoken parts from the TV show "Hoarders" which some readers consider plagiarism or similarly exploitative/ sensational as the show. I think there is something to that, it is at least disappointing that in her acknowledgments she doesn't acknowledge this fact. But I still can't deny how reading this floored me.
Because there is more to this than simply taking quotes. Durbin puts them in extremely powerful context. The way she connects a quote directly into a list of hoarded items or the conditions in the home is done flawlessly and always filled with meaningful juxtapositions. This is the kind of art that re-uses existing things (in this case quotes of a public TV show) and gives them a new jumping off point and with that creates. And it landed every fucking time. I never watched the show because the idea makes me very uncomfortable but reading this was another tiny step of working through my trauma. Which is big word and I always feel weird using that term but it's not wrong. I am not going to go as far as saying that I am a survivor but hoarders cause a lot of damage to the people near them. Damage they don't want to cause but just as with addiction there's often consequences outside their own sphere. This book looks at the hoarder and the damage their disorder causes, so other people are only mentioned peripherally. But being one of those other people I still felt seen by this, more so than the idea of the show ever did for me.
These experimental poems create an intense contrast between the often harrowing reasons that lead someone down this path (just like addiction: there's always something), you want to sympathize and support. But there's often this lack of willingness to address the elephant in the room by the hoarder because the hoarding is what gives them stability while destroying literally everything around them. It's a difficult fight, even worse when the person doesn't even want to admit that there is a problem. This writing here understands this conflict perfectly and reading it was sad, painful & hard for me but also helpful.
I'm not sure I'd ever recommend this to someone who isn't in some form affected by hoarding because I doubt they understand. Because whenever I hear people who have no clue trying to be sympathetic it shows how much they don't get it. Yet this book felt like Durbin gets it. I don't know if she also has personal history or if the show is more inspiring than it seems to me. But I am going to rate this completely by how it affected me, not by its intentions or lack thereof, not by the issues behind how this was created. Just by what reading this did for me.
I didn't know how this came to be, I wondered if Durbin had interviewed these people. Because that's what it sounded like. Like true statements uttered by people going living as hoarders. After I learnt that she took the spoken parts from the TV show "Hoarders" which some readers consider plagiarism or similarly exploitative/ sensational as the show. I think there is something to that, it is at least disappointing that in her acknowledgments she doesn't acknowledge this fact. But I still can't deny how reading this floored me.
Because there is more to this than simply taking quotes. Durbin puts them in extremely powerful context. The way she connects a quote directly into a list of hoarded items or the conditions in the home is done flawlessly and always filled with meaningful juxtapositions. This is the kind of art that re-uses existing things (in this case quotes of a public TV show) and gives them a new jumping off point and with that creates. And it landed every fucking time. I never watched the show because the idea makes me very uncomfortable but reading this was another tiny step of working through my trauma. Which is big word and I always feel weird using that term but it's not wrong. I am not going to go as far as saying that I am a survivor but hoarders cause a lot of damage to the people near them. Damage they don't want to cause but just as with addiction there's often consequences outside their own sphere. This book looks at the hoarder and the damage their disorder causes, so other people are only mentioned peripherally. But being one of those other people I still felt seen by this, more so than the idea of the show ever did for me.
These experimental poems create an intense contrast between the often harrowing reasons that lead someone down this path (just like addiction: there's always something), you want to sympathize and support. But there's often this lack of willingness to address the elephant in the room by the hoarder because the hoarding is what gives them stability while destroying literally everything around them. It's a difficult fight, even worse when the person doesn't even want to admit that there is a problem. This writing here understands this conflict perfectly and reading it was sad, painful & hard for me but also helpful.
I'm not sure I'd ever recommend this to someone who isn't in some form affected by hoarding because I doubt they understand. Because whenever I hear people who have no clue trying to be sympathetic it shows how much they don't get it. Yet this book felt like Durbin gets it. I don't know if she also has personal history or if the show is more inspiring than it seems to me. But I am going to rate this completely by how it affected me, not by its intentions or lack thereof, not by the issues behind how this was created. Just by what reading this did for me.
June 28, 2022
this is a really interesting book with lots of sharp and shocking images and dialogue. i do wonder though how much of the dialogue is just taken from the show and how much is invented? i just fear that it might be somewhat exploitative of vulnerable people. maybe the book should include more process-related information to make it clear what the author has added and what comes from the source material.
January 1, 2022
insane
a shocking read that traces the consumerism, trauma, and hoarding within the US social fabric. deftly juxtaposing *and* harmonising the internal and external reality of the people featured in this collection
a shocking read that traces the consumerism, trauma, and hoarding within the US social fabric. deftly juxtaposing *and* harmonising the internal and external reality of the people featured in this collection
January 8, 2022
I really enjoyed every poem until I got to "Maggie" and realized Kate Durbin straight plagiarized that whole story from an episode of Hoarders that I happened to see. Now I wonder what else she copied. Disappointing.
October 30, 2021
Moving portrait of how hoarders ended up hoarders, done through poetry that incorporates their “collections.” All are fascinating, some are devastating.
September 10, 2022
This book deserves 10 Stars! It is a clever book which allows us to look at the lives of hoarders and how interconnected their traumas are with the conditions in which they live. Nonjudgmental but points out the obvious. I love this book so much. BIG recommend.
September 9, 2024
upsetting in a fun (?) way
February 1, 2022
Extremely vivid. Horrifying and beautiful. I've never read anything like it before. I can't say I enjoyed reading a lot of it because it's so horrifying but it's extremely well done and It really makes you think about the world differently.
June 16, 2021
Hoarding is a condition that is both abject and poetic. The former in the obsessive accumulation, but the latter for its strange surreal manifestations, the visual elements that compound and illustrate a state of mind (and the comically disturbing fruits of capitalism). Kate Durbin's poems are portraits of a sort. The subjects are fourteen named and located individuals and one couple, the latter who live in a house with every nook and cranny filled with books. Each plays a bit like an AA meeting, with introductions and utterances, in itals, and then lists of objects that linguistically illustrate or capture the life tone:
Some of the things just don't even make sense bedroom closet with plastic hangers with nothing on them and a shelf of canned okra
That is a tableau, a photograph. There's pathos in each one, though distance is created by the absurdity of the weird shit for sale at Target, limited edition crap. And then actual crap. The book suggests actual interviews, but this might be a close read of the TV show, Hoarders, which mine case studies for entertainment value. Or Durbin may have cobbled these characters together from her imagination. They seem so real, though are there really that many different manifestations of Barbie???
Some of the things just don't even make sense bedroom closet with plastic hangers with nothing on them and a shelf of canned okra
That is a tableau, a photograph. There's pathos in each one, though distance is created by the absurdity of the weird shit for sale at Target, limited edition crap. And then actual crap. The book suggests actual interviews, but this might be a close read of the TV show, Hoarders, which mine case studies for entertainment value. Or Durbin may have cobbled these characters together from her imagination. They seem so real, though are there really that many different manifestations of Barbie???
April 21, 2022
Hoarders, a book of poetry in which each poem depicts the thoughts and collecting obsessions of a different person, was beautifully, sensitively written. Durbin takes you into the homes and psyches of a variety of hoarders, exposing the life experiences and traumas behind the behaviours - behaviours that function as both a balm and a bomb. I recognized a bit too much of myself in this book and this has led to a healthy reckoning with my relationship to stuff and a sorting and purging this coming weekend. I can and I will!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews