Hoarders, Kate Durbin
Wave Books, 2021
It’s from this world of reality television that comes artist and poet Kate Durbin’s new book, Hoarders. Each episode of the show Hoarders depicts the life of a person struggling with compulsive hoarding disorder, a chronic mental health condition first recognized in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM-5, 2013). As the show and Durbin’s poems demonstrate, to an often somber degree, anything can be hoarded, and a family (or reader) often has little power to intervene.
The poems in Hoarders all follow the same structure: a name serves as the poem title, the location of the person is given, then follows a series of prose sentence-stanzas wherein the speaker talks in italics, followed by a plain text description of what the reader/viewer would be seeing simultaneously on the TV screen. On paper this sounds like it might get old quick, but Durbin artfully knows when to be sparse and when to go all-out, which makes for a dynamic read.
For example, in what is the most humorous poem in the book, we hear about and see Noah and Allie’s book-filled home in Chicago, IL. We read that “On the first floor it is wall-to-wall books, with only a narrow path through Versailles, Great Houses of Washington, DC” (74). But surely, book hoarding isn’t a problem? As Noah says, “Books don’t bite The Science of Jurassic Park and The Lost World, Dracula” (81). While this juxtaposition, and many in this particular poem, offer moments of humor, that dissipates when one reorients themselves to the premise of the book. And if one has seen the show or knows hoarders in their own lives, how reluctant people are to admit that they have a problem.
As with the show though, the poems often focus on the most heartbreaking and scary cases and we, listening to and watching these suffering people, are sick voyeurs. In “Craig,” a diabetic 58-year-old man on the verge of eviction talks about not living up to his Nazi father’s expectations. He didn’t view his father as a “bad guy” until “At dinner one day he asked me how I liked his food and I said, it was good Dad, and he goes, I’m glad you liked it because that was your pet rabbit wind blowing through a hole in the ceiling” (57). I don’t think I’ve ever read a stanza this frightening.
While every poem in Hoarders has a thread of sadness wound within it, perhaps the saddest is “Alice”: “If they took away all my cats it would kill me two kittens facing each other on a soiled mattress; one has a gap where its eye should be” (98). It’s an understatement to say this poem was hard to read; it will be hard to read for any pet owner. But we know this happens. Durbin does not avert her eyes.
On the surface, we know what’ll we’ll find when we open up Hoarders. But those familiar with Kate Durbin’s previous work (i.e. E! Entertainment) know, and it soon becomes evident while reading, that she is not an exploitation writer. Durbin lends an ear to the hoarders in these pages—the mode of poetry allows these speakers to be human beings instead of just entertainment. In doing this, she asks us: you, me, my mom who loves to watch Survivor and TLC programming, to consider why we consume what we do. What do we get out of it? Are we not entertained? Should we be?
