Drenched Lands, Blood Compost: Disability, Land, and The Asylum Project

This lyrical essay engages with a site visit to Eloise, an abandoned mental hospital near Detroit, Michigan, seen through the lens of the Asylum Project, a disability culture research series. On this site visit, the author looks for unmarked patient graves and contemplates soil, decay, and renewal at this Michigan site; at Duin en Bosch, a coastal mental health asylum in the Netherlands; and at World War II grave sites in Belgium. Weaving together autobiography, soil, and site histories, new care narratives emerge in poetic fragments.