The Work-Shy

by Blunt Research Group

The Work-Shy painstakingly reconstructs a chorus of voices rescued from hermetic colonies and fragile communes, from worlds that work in ways that defy work as we know it. Its poetic assemblages offer direct testimony from the first youth prison in California and from asylums for the chronically insane (preserved in the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City). Painful facts emerge about sterilization mills in California, where thousands of individuals became subject to compulsory procedures (policies that shaped eugenics practice in the Third Reich). In addition, the poems translate asylum texts--the writing of the insane--into a wider field of social conflict and utopian fragments of not-yet-being.
Activating what Susan Howe calls the telepathy of the archive (and Peter Gizzi dubs archeophonics in the title of his latest collection), the poems of The Work-Shy become part of a book of listening, occupying identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement. Voices echo to form a ragged chain of soliloquies, kenning and keening, riddles and rants. Published under the collective, anonymous signature of the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, the book operates at the crossroads of lyric and documentary poetries, of singularity and collectivism. An online readers companion will be available at bluntresearchgroup.site.wesleyan.edu."

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Hardcover

Published December 27, 2016

Reviews

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Listening and being voiceless often go hand in hand, but could speech become a way of listening?”

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A really brilliant collection of “translations” from archival to verse drawn from early records of youth prisons and asylums. These poems seek to listen for the voices trapped in these records and create from them striking poems. Would highly recommended!!

[Genevieve]

"I have not been in the // I am not so" - Agnes R., p. 98