Collectors’ Items

Kate Durbin’s poetry collection Hoarders opens with Marlena, a Topanga Canyon–dwelling former fashion model who keeps Louis Vuitton bags under her bed along with “shattered seashell wreaths, rainbow dream catchers tangled with LED hummingbird wind chimes, tie-dyed lion tapestry with a hole in the lion’s face, Drew Barrymore Flower Home Collection plates with half-eaten Luna bars and dead wasps.” In some ways, Marlena is like nearly everyone I knew growing up in Los Angeles. She is also like the wronged women in Durbin’s pop culture–oriented work, such as the Playboy bunnies who haunt the purely scenic descriptions in Kept Women, Durbin’s 2012 chapbook tour of the Playboy Mansion, or Lindsay Lohan and Amanda “Foxy Knoxy” Knox, whose public suffering Durbin documents in E! Entertainment. Marlena, who considers herself the worst hoarder on the planet, thrives on the elusive brilliance characterized by excess and consumerist fantasy. By having more, you can be somebody you’re not—or at least you can try. Yet Hoarders, unlike Durbin’s previous work, isn’t about celebrity culture, much less luminescence; rather, it is a meditation on ordinary desire, even as the poetics of the book remain tangled with the odd form of public recognition offered by reality TV.

Hoarders amounts to a series of fifteen character sketches, each based on a different person (and one couple) featured in the popular A&E-originated documentary series of the same name that entered its thirteenth season in October 2021. Like the show, the book is characterized by a distinctly American lowbrow display of misery and an equally American interest in lives of abject excess. However, unlike the show’s implicit point-and-gawk approach, Durbin’s sympathetic treatment of the figures invites readers to consider how consumption shapes identity, and to entertain as reasonable the longing to hang on to every trivial item we acquire over the course of a lifetime, rather than joyfully KonMari-ing it all away.

Durbin’s method is to jam quotations from the people she studies up against representations of the objects they consume—or that consume them—as in the section on Jim, an ex-boxer and retired cop: “Give me a little hope Everlast punching bag with duct tape holding it together.”

In her selection of dialogue from the show, Durbin throws the intensity of our cultural attachment to things into relief: “This stuff gives me something to work with, piddle with and clean out...