The Work-Shy

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: the book In the Realms of the Unreal: “Insane Writings,” field worker case files from the Archives of the Eugenics Records Office, records from the now-defunct Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, Calif., and records from the Prinzhorn Collection at the Center for Psychological Medicine in Heidelberg, Germany. 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. The book features erasure-like poems sourced from these writings, a prose series that reads as both essay and statement of intent, and archival images of items owned by interned delinquents and the mentally ill. One poem drawn from school files opens with “not a dirtier boy in the house vile/ and effeminate.” Another, drawn from the writings of a mentally ill woman, reads “my jacket is/ me// my jacket is// I am not// I am not going home.” Through these writings the collective poses the crucial question: “What exactly do we hope to discover by listening to voices that have been lost or silenced?” (Nov.)