Hoarders

A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctly either. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so… show more.

Like the title might suggest, Kate Durbin’s collection points a poetic lens on a dozen or so hoarders living under the literal weight of their own material possessions. Using an interesting balance of first-person testimony set to an often dizzying and disturbing blend of descriptions of each hoarder’s stockpile of material afflictions, Hoarders feels borderline true-crime with hits vivid portrayal of mental illness and loneliness.