Kill Class by Nomi Stone

Kill Class by Nomi Stone is a collection of free verse, prose, lyric poems based on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in the US military-created mock Middle Eastern villages in the American South. The mock villages of Pineland (a fictional country) are populated by Iraqi role-play actors and are used to train soldiers for deployment in the Middle East. Stone’s poems include direct and indirect quotations from her observations and research in this setting as well as other scholarly and primary sources. The poems are deliberately unreal – it’s difficult to tell what is imagined, researched, witnessed, or experienced by the author herself. A notes section at the back of the book details the research behind each poem.

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

review: https://www.kenyonreview.org/reviews/kill-class-by-nomi-stone-738439/

an interview about the book: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/nomi-stone-kill-class/