It's a tough balance to strike, and one that calls into questions the kinds of truth-telling to which poetry is suited. The idea is to combine a nonfiction writer's practice of reportage and analysis with a lyric poet's first-person subjectivity. It is practiced most notably today by Erica Meitner, who was named an National Book Critics Circle finalist in poetry last week. Her poetic project aligns her with the documentary poetics movement, which has its roots in the work of seminal 20th century poets like Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser. The poems in Kill Class are based on two years spent observing and participating in these war games as one of the actors (she is given the name "Gypsy"). Stone is trained in anthropology, the subject she teaches at at Princeton. Now, Pineland is somewhat like the Middle East." In the beginning, Pineland was somewhat like the Soviet Union. "Pineland," Stone writes in one of many prose poems that set the scene and offer context between first-person lyrics, "has room for whatever the world does to itself. It's a mock-country where American soldiers engage in war games. Nomi Stone sets her second poetry collection in Pineland, a military training center in North Carolina.
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