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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. Durbin astutely marries content and meaning, overwhelming the reader while dialing into our internal monstrous consumer.” —Alyse Burnside, The Atlantic
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, Art Forum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at The Frye Museum in Seattle, The Pulse Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, The Spring Break Art Fair in Los Angeles, Peer to Space in Berlin, and more.
CONTENTS
Marlena
Chuck
Linda
Shelley
Craig
Cathy
Noah & Allie
Jim
Alice
Dorothy
Hannah
Ronnie
Gary
Greg
Maggie