Stranger's Notebook: Poems

by Nomi Stone

Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa. According to their story of origin, a handful of exiles arrived on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, in 586 B.C., carrying a single stone from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Drawing from this cosmology, the poems follow a stranger who arrives into an ancient community that is both at home and deeply estranged on the island. Its people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. The poems are about the daily lives and deeper cosmos of the Jews of Djerba as well as the Muslims next door. In her exploration, Stone sees vivid recurring images of keys, stones, homes, the laughter of girls, the eyes of men, the color blue, and the force of blood or bombs. With this journey of faith, doubt, longing, and home, Stone has brought readers a rare look into a story that resonates powerfully with questions of cultural preservation and coexistence.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2008

About the author

Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo 2019). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently or will soon in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her anthropological articles appear in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist, and her ethnographic monographic, Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire, is currently a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier series for Ethnographic Inquiry in the 21st Century,. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Stone has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia, an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and teaches at Princeton University.

“Stone has an edgy voice and a sharp sense of the music of words….she is able to make this anthropological excavation into something both beautiful and haunting, laced with double meanings: ‘The people speak// the language of a country we are trying/ to make into a kinder country.'”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“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

“Kill Class is unsettling, arresting, essential. The poems insist we listen to war’s distant cry, its close sigh, to the wreckage of language, to the questions buried and excavated, to worlds lost, to faces “sent to sea,” to hearts incapable of translating other hearts. Nomi Stone is an invaluable voice.” —Nathalie Handal

“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

“Nomi Stone’s stark and unflinching poems give a harrowing sense of cultural understanding made into a vehicle of state violence. At the same time, with tremendous delicacy and grace, they enter into the minds and lives of American soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts, revealing bewilderment where you would have thought to find certitudes, vulnerability where you would expect only hardness, small

Reviews

[Nomi]

This is my book. Here's what TriQuarterly and my blurbers say:

Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa. According to their story of origin, a handful of exiles arrived on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, in 586 B.C., carrying a single stone from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Drawing from this cosmology, the poems follow a stranger who arrives into an ancient community that is both at home and deeply estranged on the island. Its people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. The poems are about the daily lives and deeper cosmos of the Jews of Djerba as well as the Muslims next door. In her exploration, Stone sees vivid recurring images of keys, stones, homes, the laughter of girls, the eyes of men, the color blue, and the force of blood or bombs. With this journey of faith, doubt, longing, and home, Stone has brought readers a rare look into a story that resonates powerfully with questions of cultural preservation and coexistence.

"Stone is a genuine poet, with the capacity of seeming artless while being extremely artful."--Alicia Ostriker

"Nomi Stone brings to life the searing heat, the balance of superstition and tradition, and the flow of history that has built up to become the tremendous monument that is daily life. Stone speaks from a point both inside and out, letting us see the frame and stand inside it at the same time. It's an electric place to be."--Cole Swensen

"Nomi Stone has created a poetic space and time in which each appears to be a stranger to each other, and a stranger to him or herself. Deeply realized, Stranger's Notebook is a remarkable achievement, ultimately and powerfully grounded in the deepest and strangest human mystery of love." —Lawrence Joseph, author of Into It and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased since the author is my friend, but all of you should go out and buy a copy to support poetry that isn't written by old white men who live in New England.

Screed aside, this is a perfect book for people who love Anne Carson's work. Nomi's work is incredibly creative and thoughtful. The book is grounded in the research she did while living within a community of Sephardic Jews in Tunisia as a Fulbright scholar. Her poems explore notions of exile, exclusion/inclusion, identity, and home.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this fine book of poems, Ms Stone shares “her encounter with one of the last traditional and cohesive Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa,” located on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia and traditionally believed to be founded in 586 BCE. Ms Stone writes about her visit and about the Jewish and Muslim cultures on the island with an anthropologist’s objectivity and a poet’s sensitivity to nuance.

“A girl at last hands back your book. On the last page, each/ has carefully written her name, in their language, then in your own.” Welcome Party

...”When there is a death there,” she tells us/ “My day is backwards. I drop things./ My grief falls in the soup./ I feed it to my children..” What We Ask the Messiah to Save

“...Half/ of all time aches with/the gift of not,//its memory of.” . How We Recognized Our Longing

[Julia McDaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling reading for all; necessary reading for anyone who has been a cultural outsider.

[rachkatr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love poetry from the point of view of an anthropologist. Every line feels rich with tradition, history, language.