"[5] For Write or Die Magazine, Ben Fama wrote: "Kate has a gift of prophecy—she sees things happening before other people do, and uses this extreme present as material for her work.
"[6] The Ravenous Audience, a collection of poetry that utilizes a wide variety of forms, was selected by Chris Abani for the Black Goat imprint of Akashic Books.
The book deals with coming of age via a variety of media, from poems based on the films of Catherine Breillat to rewrites of archetypal figures such as Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Jezebel, and Clara Bow.
In a review for Rain Taxi, Johannes Goransson called the book "iconophilic, starving...a poetics of Plath-influenced engagement with the peanut crunching crowd.
It consists of stories crafted from meticulous transcriptions of reality television shows revolving around Hollywood, gender, class and lifestyle themes.
Using reality television as a medium, Durbin explores an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal, tender, and sorrowful."
Instead of using Tara's story to make us feel better about ourselves for not being hoarders, she indicts aspects of American culture we all participate in—religion, capitalism—and reveals our complicity, all while dropping a lot of sight gags in the process.
"[2] Alyse Burnside writes in the Atlantic: "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.
[12] The performance (2014-2015) took place "IRL," in a public setting such as a mall or art fair, and online on the Facebook event wall, simultaneously.
[18] Gaga Stigmata received considerable press attention from sources as diverse as NPR, CBC's Q, Yale's American Scholar Magazine, AOL, The Atlantic, Spex, Huffington Post, Pop Matters, Berfrois, Voice Tribune, and many others.
[citation needed] The journal has been used as a resource in classrooms across the world, and has been studied at conferences as a phenomenon in its own right, as a new way to do criticism in the era of the internet.
[23] Durbin has spoken about her childhood upbringing in fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity, where she was pulled out of school to homeschool, although she says she "did not do much schoolwork" and was "a feral child."