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In her second full-length collection of poems, poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone submits herself to the 21st century American war machine. The documentary poems of
Kill Class (Tupelo Press) were composed as Stone conducted an ethnographic study of military training modules for her doctoral thesis in anthropology. In these poems, Stone acutely observes the physical and social structures of Pineland, a large-scale set piece created by the United States military to prepare soldiers to deploy in war and conflict zones. The marketplaces and dwellings of the four mock villages that Stone observed are populated by American and Iraqi civilians employed by the United States government to act out roles in the installation, in addition to the new recruits undergoing training.