The Work-Shy: (Wesleyan Poetry)

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.

About the Author :
BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP is a nameless constellation of poets, artists, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. Work by BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP has been published by Noemi Press and has appeared in museums across the country.

Review :
"The Work-Shy 'wrest[s] poems from the lived experience of incarceration as if poetry could be a jailbreak ... The success of BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP's undertaking rests in their soft but persistent demand that we as readers listen.'"--Eli P. Mandel "Make literary magazine" (5/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) "To striking, uncomfortable effect, the collection illuminates the eugenicist movement's ties to state schools for the so called 'work-shy'--children deemed incorrigibles by the state--and mental health institutions in the early 20th century."--John Wilkinson "Publishers Weekly" (12/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) "The found-language portrait...it's almost all Blunt Research Group does, and they do it superbly, scarily, never forgetting how much these lives have been shaped...never forgetting how much we cannot know."--Steph Burt "The Yale Review" (6/19/2017 12:00:00 AM) "In its every aspect, The Work-Shy, is generative of thinking, and that should be counted a true achievement. Books of poetry often have a take-it-or-leave-it air. The Work-Shy, though is worrying and when shut continues to worry its reader, not least because there are poems in the second sequence that make much admired poetry of the present look posturing and paltry."--John Wilkinson "Critical Inquiry" (3/23/2017 12:00:00 AM) "The chorus of voices raised in this book refuses isolation."--Henk Rossouw "Boston Review" (2/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) "The Work-Shy celebrates an old theme, the vision of madness and degeneracy as a path beyond instrumentalized compliance. But simultaneously the book takes as its focus the suffering required to even passively resist the violent absurdity of authoritarianism."--Frances Richard "4 Columns" (2/10/2017 12:00:00 AM) "In this deeply sociopolitical collection, the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, an anonymous poet-scholar collective, sheds light on the history of American eugenics by resuscitating material from four primary sources.(...)To striking, uncomfortable effect, the collection illuminates the eugenicist movement's ties to state schools for the so called 'work-shy'--children deemed incorrigibles by the state--and mental health institutions in the early 20th century."--Publishers Weekly "The place of The Work-Shy at the intersection of poetic unsilencing, documentary, and outsider projects outlined at the start, now makes criticism seem inevitable; the history of each of these projects has been attended by poetic, political, and ethical argument. In its every aspect The Work-Shy is generative of thinking, and that should be counted a true achievement. Books of poetry often have a take-it-or-leave-it air. The Work-Shy though is worrying and when shut continues to worry its reader, not least because there are poems in the second sequence that make much admired poetry of the present look posturing and paltry." --John Wilkinson, Critical Inquiry