“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

“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