Nomi Stone – författare

Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.

Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.

Breaking into Blossom gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Finding fracturing points in their own conversation while considering the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different kinds of endings, the editors consider such questions as the value of epiphany, what kinds of endings might be likelier to be commodified, how the poem and the mind keep going beyond the page, and more. Hankins and Stone also offer a taxonomy of ending types to think with. This groundbreaking anthology includes poems about mystery, love, dread, cruelty, violence and war; poems of motherhood; of disability; of masculinity; of queerness; of baldness. Poems of transforming bodies and Black joy and failure and hope. The poems sometimes break into blossom; other times, they just break. Or they leave us in wonderment with their quiet buds unfolding into the world.