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Nomi Stone

Goodreads Author

Website

https://www.tupelopress.org/product/kill-class/

Genre

Poetry

Member Since

July 2008

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Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo 2019). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently or will soon in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her anthropological articles appear in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist, and her ethnographic monographic, Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire, is currently a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier series for Ethnographic Inquiry in the 21st Century,. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trai
Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo 2019). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently or will soon in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her anthropological articles appear in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist, and her ethnographic monographic, Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire, is currently a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier series for Ethnographic Inquiry in the 21st Century,. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Stone has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia, an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and teaches at Princeton University.

“Stone has an edgy voice and a sharp sense of the music of words….she is able to make this anthropological excavation into something both beautiful and haunting, laced with double meanings: ‘The people speak// the language of a country we are trying/ to make into a kinder country.'”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“There is a door in every word of Nomi Stone’s Kill Class, a fierce book of poems that is a field report from the fake villages of a fictional country built in America, where U.S. soldiers and civilians of Middle Eastern descent dream-walk and role-play at war for military training purposes. This is the world of military technology fairs, the village in a box, the kill zone, where pretend Iraqi towns are brought to life—and death—in the language of a country / we are trying to make into a kinder country. Stone’s language sears through the simulation to the actual war, lighting a long fuse of image and utterance that detonates, finally, in the imagination of what we have become. This is a report from depths of the war machine. Are you writing this down? one of the soldiers asks. Yes. And we can be grateful she has done so. Kill Class is a rare achievement.” —Carolyn Forché

“Nomi Stone has a singular gift for excavating the magnetism between language and the physical bodies it signifies. In her extraordinary collection Kill Class, Stone makes poems out of the hubris and mistrust that make violence a human commodity. And through these moments of violence, she builds poem that are simultaneously archival and creative. She excavates lyrics that meditate on humanity without ever losing sight of the brutal transactions of war and their requisite dehumanizations, subjugations, and traumas. What an unexpected and absorbing book.” —Adrian Matejka

“Kill Class is unsettling, arresting, essential. The poems insist we listen to war’s distant cry, its close sigh, to the wreckage of language, to the questions buried and excavated, to worlds lost, to faces “sent to sea,” to hearts incapable of translating other hearts. Nomi Stone is an invaluable voice.” —Nathalie Handal

“Easily one of the most important books of our time. Stone is a principled poet, rousing the conscience of poetry for a nation asleep through its wars and annihilation of real, live human bodies. Her concerns for the world are only matched by her skills as a poet. There is no denial in her lines that this world is worth protecting and that it is entirely up to us, ‘Brother, look into my eyes until the act is done.’” –—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

“Nomi Stone’s stark and unflinching poems give a harrowing sense of cultural understanding made into a vehicle of state violence. At the same time, with tremendous delicacy and grace, they enter into the minds and lives of American soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts, revealing bewilderment where you would have thought to find certitudes, vulnerability where you would expect only hardness, small ...more

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Nomi Stone’s books

Average rating: 4.36 · 157 ratings · 21 reviews · 9 distinct works • Similar authors

	Kill Class 4.40 avg rating — 67 ratings — published 2019	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing by Natalie Díaz (Editor), Hanif Abdurraqib (Contributor), Patricia Smith (Contributor) 4.33 avg rating — 33 ratings — published 2019 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Stranger's Notebook: Poems 4.29 avg rating — 28 ratings — published 2008 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Léon Spilliaert by Leon Spilliaert (Artist), Luc Tuymans (Foreword), Adrian Locke (Contributor) 4.17 avg rating — 23 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century Book 8) 4.40 avg rating — 15 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Bettering American Poetry, Volume 2 by Amy King (Goodreads Author), Jayy Dodd (Editor), Camile Rankine (Editor) 4.57 avg rating — 14 ratings — published 2017	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems by Nomi Stone (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Luke Hankins (Goodreads Author) (Editor) 4.25 avg rating — 4 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions by Debi Cornwall (Photographer), Makeda Best (Contributor), Roy Scranton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor) really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings by Luke Hankins (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Nomi Stone (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Kaveh Akbar (Contributor) it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Collected Poems

by Robert Lowell

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Aug 06, 2008 03:43PM

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“To love is to tell the story of the world.”
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¡ POETRY ! — 22582 members — last activity Dec 24, 2025 01:37PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more

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