A Perfect Not-There
seven poems by Nomi Stone with woodcuts by Howard Paine
fine press edition limited to 30 copies
13 x 7 x 3/8 inches (closed), 18 pages
ISBN 978-0-9904562-4-7
Copies are available also at Jackson Street Booksellers (402-341-2664).
These poems — based on the experiences of a drone pilot and a refugee worker, and on Stone’s observations at military training camps — are a meditation on twenty-first century warfare. Howard Paine created six linocuts inspired by the poems. (One cut is re-printed in variant form on the front cover.)
These poems and author’s note were hand set in Garamond and printed during the spring and summer of 2018. The following winter Howard Paine created the images, and his plates as well front and end matter were printed early in 2019 after record snows and cold temperatures in Omaha gave way to spring again. The title face is Caslon Old Style, text paper is Fabriano Rosaspina, cover is Cave Paper’s Natural Flax, and the endsheet is Lokta Himalayas. Denise Brady printed text and linocuts on a Vandercook No. 4. She was also typesetter and binder.
Due to an unplanned delay in production, this limited edition was completed after (rather than before) Stone’s Tupelo Press publication Kill Class, where some of these poems appear.
Nomi Stone’s Kill Class, her second full collection, was issued from Tupelo Press in 2019. Her poems appeared recently or will soon appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series, Bettering American Poetry 2017, The Best American Poetry 2016, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. A Perfect Not-There and Kill Class are based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Nomi Stone is a 2018 Pushcart Prize winner, earned an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, and teaches at Princeton University.
Howard Paine is an active artist working in the fields of printmaking and digital media. His work is concerned with the interaction of biology and technology and the impact that these two elements can have on each other in both intended and unexpected ways. The cycle of death, decay, and new life are also important ideas within the work. He has shown widely at the regional and national level. Howard received an MFA in Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995. He lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska where he is an Associate Professor of Printmaking at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
