"War Catalogues" by Nomi Stone

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 27, 2018   War Catalogues   Nomi Stone

Soldiers collect & number: pigment, hair, jade, roasted meat, timber, cum. The enemy's flute; the face of an enemy as he holds his young; the enemy's face the moment it's harmed. The woods are a class in what they can take. The country is fat. We eat from its side.                Copyright © 2018 Nomi Stone. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "'War Catalogues' is part of my forthcoming book, Kill Class, which documents my ethnographic fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages constructed by the U.S. military across America for pre-deployment cultural trainings. This poem wrestles with imperial theft and impulse to catalogue—not only of tusks and jade and porcelain, but also of human behavior, physiognomy, longing, grief, our outputs, our interiors. It is a record, too, of my feelings of dread and complicity around American Empire." —Nomi Stone   Nomi Stone's second collection of poems, Kill Class, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. She teaches anthropology at Princeton University and lives in Philadelphia.     Photo credit: James Campbell Taylor Poetry by Stone   Stranger's Notebook (Triquarterly Books, 2008) "Between Wars" by Joy Ladin "A Little Menu" by Don Mee Choi "Mercy" by Tyehimba Jess March Guest Editor: Meghan O'Rourke   Thanks to Meghan O'Rourke, author of Sun in Days (W. W. Norton, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about O'Rourke and our other guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

From Our Advertisers