EBOOK
About
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.
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.
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Reviews
"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
""[The Work-Shy] raises important questions for the entire field of citational and conceptual poetics-which includes word-borrowers of many stripes-about sources, sourcelessness, and what sorts of realities inhere in projects of linguistic remediation.""
Ingrid Becker
""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
Extended Details
- SeriesWesleyan Poetry