Kill Class

by Nomi Stone

A poet and anthropologist explores the surprising world of war games in mock Middle Eastern villages in which the U.S. military trains. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine--alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart. Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone's two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at Pineland, a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. Kill Class is an arresting ethnography of American military culture, one that allows readers to circle at length through the cloverleaf interchanges where warfare nestles into even the most mundane corners of everyday life.

"Kill Class is a rare achievement...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." -Carolyn Forché

"Easily one of the most important books of our time. Nomi 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

"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. What a potent treatise on war-making." -Adrian Matejka

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2019

About the author

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

Reviews

[Ace Boggess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarest of all are poetry collections that leave me thinking "This would make a good feature film." Nomi Stone's Kill Class had that sort of power. The poems follow the journey of a translator/anthropologist in Iraq conflict zones. They do this with grace and flourish while not shying away from the inevitable sullenness or absurdity of the situations the narrator finds herself in, as with these lines from "Wound Kit":

"Nafeesa asks a soldier: "Ha yemut?" [Will he die?].
The soldier can't understand / thrusts paper and pencil at her.

If she writes it down he can look it up.
Nafeesa says: "Turid arsihm?" [You want me to draw
it?]."


Stone never abandons language while musing. Nor does she offer explicit judgments about the things her narrator witnesses. Instead, she capture scene and story with such delicacy that it's difficult to imagine these poems being written any other way. As an example, here a re few lines from "The Door," one of my favorites in the book:

"wishing. In Arabic,
there is a word that means the cleaving
from dormancy or sorrow
into first joy.
Or, the arriving
mouth of the messenger.
It is right on the other side of this wood."

A remarkable book. I can't say that I've read one like it. Highly recommended.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

My praise for this book is: I don’t know where to put my praise for this book. Nomi Stone’s Kill Class is disorienting and surefooted; is a landscape spiritual that weeps not away, but toward. Immersion is not a drill, and practice is born perfect. For all Kill Class so clinically prepares, the paused hungers of its verse, and the appetites therein, offer that perhaps we had our error and ate it, too. War calls it body; this violence that puts meat on the bone. And Stone asks for more. For the body to show its face. For wound to do the salting. For humanization to finish what it started. For transactional oneness. And for surgery, before we vanish.

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nomi Stone's KILL CLASS is a poetry collection of contemporary urgency, one anyone who cares or troubles over the distinctions between poetry and life, poetry and ethnographic fieldwork, and simulations/performance vs. "real life" (here, in the context of war) should immediately read. Stone's linguistic and observational gifts are virtuosic, but her perhaps most memorable gift is her ability to articulate and elucidate the false binaries between all military conflicts: us/them, inside/outside, enemy/friend. "Are we in a game of war, or a painting?" the speaker poignantly asks, and we, the readers, are pressed to respond. But how can we, adequately, when each scenario, and, thus, personage, is fictionalized? Rife with allusions both to and extrinsic to the "war scenario," Stone is one of the few living poets today who can interweave lyrical pathos with gut-wrenching truth: "Brother, look into my eyes/ until the act is done."

[Lauren 罗云 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am endlessly struck by the way Dr. Stone examines the intersections of violence, empathy, and the ethics of war through a poetic yet piercing lens, proving that poetry can serve as a means of examining moral ambiguity and the human impact of conflict. Her ability to translate anthropological experiences from fieldwork into powerful, resonant poetry is inspiring and resonates deeply with my own research interests. She is a poetics craft master and, insha'Allah, I can take a poetry workshop with her some day soon.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s interesting that at a time when military spending is at its highest, Americans know so little about how it operates in carrying out its widespread military conflicts. Reading this poetry was fascinating in that it allowed a peak behind the curtain, but what makes the collection really special is the anthropologist speaker that refuses to lose their sense of empathy and conscience, restoring humanity to the dehumanized targets in the “kill class.”

[Jessica]

“Whichever way you turn, soldiers / dream-walk in and out of the poem. The dark / is sweet: a nerve inside a tooth. / If midnight comes, tell it what you saw: hooded, quartered / face-down in gravel. Break / the ice with the bad guy. Then when / it’s time, a tooth for a tooth.” —from “The Pines Make a Circle

[Stephen Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing, different, powerful. Just read it.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the book review wasn't so good, I don't think I would be as disappointed as I am.

Solid book of poems with a great premise. Just wish I hadn't read the book review first (but then again I would have never bought the book without the book review!)

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing. Horrifying. This examination of war games the contemporary USA is equally an examination of language and experience translation through multiple cultures and across many individuals. Stone's writing is crystalline and brutally informative.