Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex, City Lights Publishers, 2005."In the alternate universe of Atomik Aztex, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders long ago. Aztek warriors with totemic powers are busy colonizing Europe, and human sacrifice is basic to economic growth."
Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is plagued by nightmares of a parallel reality where American consumerism reigns supreme. Ghosts of banished Aztek warriors emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles, and Zenzontli’s visions of Hell become real as he’s trapped in a job in an East L.A. meatpacking plant."
"With Atomic Aztex, Foster slices through history. His Aztex are not so very different from the Spanish colonialists or the corporate greed-mongers or the Farmer John pig butchers. "Everybody knows," he acknowledges from the outset, "that atavism and savagery make the world go round." For Foster, as a writer, the best strategy for fighting back is to rip up the language... He is not the first writer to use odd spellings to arrest our normal reading patterns. And he is not the first artist to explore the fantasy life of someone working on a factory line. But Foster puts his finger here on a particular nexus of World War II-era racism, factory life and the landscape of Los Angeles and then claims it for his very own." – Los Angeles Times
"It sounds completely unmanageable, but readers will be blown away by Foster's control over the material, the beautiful segues between worlds and the way in which the question 'what time is it?' accrues more and more weight. Brilliantly inventive." —Publishers Weekly
"...A book so heedlessly imaginative it often seems ready to burst its pages like a comic-book POW." —Bookforum
"...a graphic, hilarious and violent chronicle of multiple realities that could emerge... an amazing exercise of radical imagination." - Guillermo Gómez-Peña
"Atomik Aztex is hip, bloody, occasionally baffling and often piercingly brilliant." – Cherie Parker
"Hilarious, poignant, and at times devastating, Foster has crafted a fine... cocktail of sublime anarchy to toss into the machine." - Rubén Martínez
"The prose is an electrifying, eclectic phantasmagoria of Groucho's marxism, dadada, surreal and naturalcombined with double-edged intellectual/historical hysteria." - Rick Harsh
"This is one mad neighborhood carnival roller coaster ride through Aztlán, the underground, the QT... Oddball, hilarious—deep." - Marisela Norte
Atomik Aztex was chosen the Winner of The Believer Magazine Book Award 2005!!
"From here, observes Sesshu Foster, standing in a minimal parking lot with his nose to the breeze, "You can get a whiff of Farmer John." He's talking about the enormous southeast Los Angeles pork slaughterhouse a few blocks away, and he's right: Today the air smells like dry dog food—with an edge. Some days the smell leans darkly toward the pig shit end of the aromatic spectrum, other days into the molasses sector. Farmer John is one small, fragrant corner of the "ever-expanding omniverse" described in Atomik Aztex, Foster's first novel, which leaps fearlessly back and forth from 1940s Stalingrad, where an elite cadre of Aztec warriors is helping the Russians fend off invading Nazis, to "the frenetic hustle of overcrowded Teknotitlan," capital of the "Aztek Socialist Imperium," to the industrial back alleys of "some 3rd-class city called Los Angeles, someplace to the north. Kalifornia or some fucking thing, Western Civilization, the New World, they called it..."
Except for a two-year MFA stint in Iowa City and a few collegiate years in the Bay Area, Foster has lived within a few miles of this spot for the last 40 years. Tall, with wiry dark hair going gray at the temples, Foster is a self-described half-breed, the offspring of a Japanese American mother and an Anglo father who was "part of that whole Beat Generation thing." Foster's voice drops occasionally into the slow Chicano rhythms of the East L.A. neighborhood in which his mother eventually settled down. But until his parents split when he was eight, Foster says, "the life we were living was this crazy American life of driving all over California, always being on the road, never having a place to stay, never having any money, not having food." And while he cites Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs as major literary influences (though Ishmael Reed comes more immediately to mind), it's in conscious reaction to that Beat-era art world of "alcoholic, profligate, dissolute, irresponsible white guys having their kicks and leaving town" that Foster has made a point of staying put.
"A lot of Anglo culture to me seems like it's very restless—it's about consuming what you can at the place you're at and moving on to the next thing," Foster says over a plate of barbacoa at a Mexican café blocks from Farmer John. "I thought that one of the solutions is to learn how to live in the place that you are and make your art from that."
So Foster has worked hard to live out a sort of rooted urban regionalism. He's been a key player in L.A.'s east-side poetry scene for years, and teaches writing in the local public schools. His last book, 1996's City Terrace Field Manual, a collection of prose poems largely set in the eponymous neighborhood in which Foster grew up, mapped out a highly localized literary terrain in which political, cultural, and personal histories intimately intertwine.
In Atomik Aztex, Foster says, he wanted to get away from the barely veiled autobiography of his poems, "to do something that leaned on the imagination, that made it bear the burden of storytelling."
The imagination leans back hard in Atomik Aztex, which folds kung fu showdowns with gangsta-tattooed Aztec warriors into the mix with moments of misty-alleyed L.A. noir; an Isaac Babel ("Isaak," actually) in black leather; a naked, 400-pound Hermann Goering, emptied of entrails, bouncing down the steps of the Great Pyramid; brief flashes of barrio realism; and semi-lengthy quotes from Marx and Lenin. "Persons attempting to find a plot in this book should read Huck Finn," Foster warns in a prefatory note, but there is one, sort of—it's just happening in several parallel realities at once. Foster's protagonist, Zenzontli, is at times a mildly henpecked "Keeper of the House of Darkness of the Azteks" sent off on a suicide mission to Stalingrad to collect Nazis with still-beating hearts for the state sacrificial rites ("It's one of the great sadnesses of my life," he laments, "that unknowingly I participated in the total destruction of the kool ancient civilizations of the Caucasians"), at times an insomniac immigrant with an alcoholic ex-wife and a worse than dead-end job slicing pigs into packageable pieces. This world, after all, "is some shifty joint where universes intersekt & spin away into new directions like car crashes on the Golden State Freeway."
Behind all the koncentrated kraziness is a serious engagement with what Foster calls "prissy fucking History"—the grand, soggy compendium of untold stories, erasures, disappearances, and genocides that end up making most of our decisions for us. And spurring him, Foster admits, driving now, lunch and Farmer John behind us, is a Beat-inspired social critique, but with more pointed politics. "Part of the intent of the book is to talk about the sorry state of America that almost everybody—left, right, and center—hates," Foster says. He waves one hand above the steering wheel, his gesture encompassing the miles of mini-malls, the passing cars, the stench-soaked air. "Is that it?" he laughs. "That's it? That's all we get?" - Ben Ehrenreich
Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook, City Lights Publishers, 2009."The first team sport in human history was played with a ball made of stone, on courts that have been found from the Mayan ruins of Central America to Arizona. Thus we find a soccer dad walking the sidelines of a scuffed LA field, its goal lines swirling, nets strung loosely between daylight and the spirit world—Foster's inimitably fierce and powerfully evocative mix of the fantastic and the mundane."
"Sesshu Foster's World Ball Notebook is a tour de force of the wide shot and the close-up. On the 'world ball' field, the actions of governments ricochet off each other and their citizens; simultaneously, the moves each individual makes in her life produce private effects and global reverberations. Very few contemporary writers have captured with such skill and feeling the specific geography and register of Los Angeles—its relentless highways, urban milieu, mixes of peoples and languages, various local struggles—and its inextricability from much larger geographical, political and human landscapes that stretch from the American West to Central and South America to Asia. Past and present and future constitute their own playing fields, too. What distinguishes World Ball Notebook from an array of contemporary poetry books is the capaciousness of Foster's vision, one that never generalizes or makes reductive, and his empathetic respect for the individual characters whose lives might otherwise be lost to history." —Dorothy Wang, Judge for the Poetry category of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Awards
"World Ball Notebook is Sesshu Foster's breakthrough book, the one where he raises the trenchant deadpan observations of City Terrance Field Manual (1996) and the alternative universe hijinks of Atomik Aztex (2005) to a new and ever more potent level (Beware, dear reader, the contents of this book are radioactive). Always able to be surprising and incisive, he now arrives at the marvelous in the ordinary, banal, and abject, and, in words that dance and tremble, conveys the sheer (and often terrifying) wonder that one is alive in a terrible, weird, and nutty time. It is this wonder ––this sense of seeing everyday life for the first time, and embracing every part of it without exception––that places Foster at the forefront of innovative and daring writing. This book is exhilarating, and I am grateful to the author for giving me the chance to see the world this way." —John Yau
"As if channeling Robbe-Grillet, who strove to establish 'new relations between man and the world,' Sesshu Foster's electrifying prose poems tenderly examine then fiercely weave stark-and-broken realities into luminous dream-like narratives on the game of life." — Wanda Coleman
"What playing field are we on exactly? The game gets hotter more interesting and 'stranged' as Sesshu Foster expands the metaphor in this dizzying collection of 'high energy constructs'. A delicious mongrel mix of cross-cultural underbelly reveries, anecdotes, observations, snapshots, histories, politics. He is one of our wittiest, wide-awake, astute, 21st century raconteurs. 'Take me out to the ballgame... I don't care if I never come back...'" —Anne Waldman
"Read this book and you will reach Nirvana in one hour. You will have become many lives, entered into the empty space of form and non-form, substance, texture and anti-being, you will have loved immense figures and you will have been spotted as a jazzy molecule in the stadium where all lives go to whirr and burn. A delicious lightning bolt of ecstatic urban Goddess-breath. This book is made of love. Read it now and be saved." —Juan Felipe Herrera
"In a vanguard literary community that valorizes the political as either schizoid submissions to academia or the witty recycling of dilettantes, Sesshu Foster's hybrid poetry is scandalous in its revolutionary spirit and aims. And what is the primary aim of World Ball Notebook? To witness: the street, the people, the neighborhood, the city, and through each of them, the game. I feel Mission of Burma in this writing; and peasant rebels, goalies, Adorno, and beer. Guy Debord would have liked this book--it is nothing less than one brave man's pocket-sized encyclopedia of daily life, rage, and delight in L.A. The curation of its 'entries,' and the mix of their contents and registers, is so deft as to be explosive. The difference between Debord and Foster, however, is that one speaks from snide isolation, the other from street-level absorption. The book's soccer frame is absurd and useful: it reminds me I don't really know where I am, primarily as a reader, but also as a citizen. I don't know what the score is, but I am always in attendance. Sesshu Foster is a punk, a father, a traveler, a lover, and a writer." —Jeff Clark
"The ruled lines of a notebook take control in a book where the logic of the list becomes the backbone of urban collectivity, and where the game becomes written instruction as much as an invitation to play." - Poetry Project Newsletter
"Foster's strength is twofold: As an observer, he transforms the most mundane events into moments of intense awareness; as a writer, he reduces the chaos of an inexplicable world into tightly cropped snapshots... For those just discovering Foster, 'Notebook' stands well on its own. For those familiar with his two previous titles - City Terrace Field Manual, a prose poem survival guide of sorts to inner-city Los Angeles, and 'Atomik Aztex,' a gritty genre-bending novel about an alternate universe in which the indigenous Azteks rule the world - World Ball Notebook feels like the completion of a trilogy. While maintaining Foster's signature taut, almost abbreviated language, 'Notebook' seems more settled, more self-aware than either previous book." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Foster divides World Ball Notebook into 118 "Games" and begins with special thanks to his daughters' soccer coach. But his prose poems, letter-poems, checklists, shopping lists, and overheard conversations are not about soccer, exactly. Rather, they emulate soccer: they are global, tachycardic, and filled with lightning-swift exchanges. Standout poems like Game 101 combine road-trip fog with political statement: "when the officer of the state patrol asks you to step out of the vehicle you translate this to mean, I feel it, I too feel I must vomit..." A little queasy and uneasy, but in a good way, World Ball Notebook travels widely in space and time, offering bursts of adrenaline and, afterwards, weary clarity." - The University of Arizona Poetry Center
"Sesshu Foster uses prose poems and mixed-genre texts to elevate the timeless game of soccer onto new levels of action and challenge. Playing fields in East L.A. become universal planes where human encounters bring surprise and drama. Foster's brief forms expand into tales of personal experience that open to larger truths about culture, sports, and the shrinking world where the individual kicks and tosses a ball onto the courtyard to gain a chance to survive. These prose poems are building blocks toward a vibrant understanding of how individuals clash, reunite, and score with language, vision, and the competitive edge that a keen poet brings to generations of textual games." - Bloomsbury Review
"Ever inventive, Foster doesn't call these 118 entries poems, he calls them games, as in the Mesoamerican sport that's played with a stone ball -- all the more challenging, all the more fragile. Just like in his satyrical novel Atomik Aztex, in which he created a parallel universe in which the Aztecs were not conquered by the Spaniards, the playing field of World Ball Notebook - where conflict and corruption reign supreme - begins to look startlingly and comfortably familiar." - Rigoberto Gonzalez
"This isn't the sweeping canvas of his previous novel, the masterful Atomik Aztex, it is, instead, a book of quiet, weirdly hilarious, yet searing moments... It's a slowly stitched together collection of small incidents that gradually start to seem more defiant than random, more funny than futile." -Hal Niedzviecki
"Foster's work exists at the intersection of writing the continuous present and capturing singular moments within the flow of life... These poems lift great silences off any small detail, whether in the world or in his imagination. And even though Foster's work takes us to various places around the world, it remains focused on Los Angeles and that `infinite city's requirements, distractions, possibilities.'" - Craig Santos Perez
"OK, that’s my preface to Sesshu Foster’s City Lights Books reading from his latest book, World Ball Notebook. This is the second time I’ve seen Sesshu read; the first was with Small Press Traffic for their evening of fiction which also included R. Zamora Linmark, and so I was very happy to be co-hosting that event. I’m a big fan of his work, having come to City Terrace Field Manual nearly a decade after its release. Still, I realize I came to this book at exactly the right time in my poetics, writing process, ongoing education. At his SPT reading, I picked up Atomik Aztex, which was bloody, surreal, absurd, crazy, and dense, and really very very funny.
At this point in my reading of his work, I am coming to understand well some things about his process. It’s hard not to admire him. We just picked up World Ball Notebook so I haven’t read it yet. What I can say so far from what I’ve heard from his readings, and from his and his editor’s talk yesterday evening, is that Sesshu is interested in these poems about being a father, a soccer dad, about time passing, about place and geography, what poetry exists in the spaces we inhabit/live in, how we impart poetry in all these places. He is playful, and of course we see this in the game format of this book, i.e. each poem is a “game,” and he is interested also in these games/poems being interactive. That is, we create via our social interactions, our dialogues, our sharing of space and information. Space here can also be e-space, productively used.
Certainly, the soccer game is one of those spaces a soccer dad can occupy over time, and see people growing and changing. He told us of one of his daughter’s teammates, whose family was brilliant, academically successful. At some point after graduating from Brown University (or other Ivy League school), she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and is now homeless, living in the streets, in Ghana. So this is obviously a sad story, but imagine how it must weigh on the former soccer dad, who saw this girl grow up alongside his own daughter. Perhaps he saw her every week, and perhaps he was on the soccer field sidelines with this girl’s parents every week, for years.
OK, so that’s one thing about this collection — its range. Optometry questionnaires and Trader Joe’s grocery lists, internet memes are all a part of that world of soccer games, giving his daughter rides to the wrong airport during LA rush hour gridlock traffic, standing in line at the DMV for hours and having a crappy or dorky diver’s license picture to commemorate those many hours in the DMV line, and so the poetic forms he uses, also have range, as does the book’s emotional content.
His City Lights Books editor hosted the reading, which afterward, she opened up for a Q&A. We were able to hear from her how she worked with him in developing this collection. She also told us about the challenges in editing Atomik Aztex, in considering accessibility while protecting the interests of the author. At this point I thought, OMFG, this woman edited Atomik Aztex, and this made her the most amazing person ever. I do wish I could remember her name. She was great about stepping back and letting Sesshu have the podium.
She and Sesshu did talk about that development of the manuscript into the book, and this was really great, for we were able to hear Sesshu discuss his poetic concerns. He tells us he is against refinement for sake of itself. If what you are writing is rough, if that is the effect you want your work to have because it mirrors the lived experience, then forego that process of refinement. Let the work have grit, or let it be whatever it needs to be. We definitely see this in the very “in the moment” sense of the poems, in which he does pay acute attention to that moment’s internal and external details. Nicely structured litanies about very profound concepts come to him while washing the dishes, for example.
Oscar asked Sesshu a question about his use of the prose block or prose poem, and his answer was great: Sesshu told us he felt uneasy or uncomfortable with enjambment. He told us, how many poems do you read on the page that you wonder about that enjambment. And then when you hear the author read that poem, s/he completely disregards that enjambment. So then, what’s the point of it? Here, I was thinking, AMEN! How many times do I read a poem that I wonder, why is this considered a poem? Because it’s broken into lines? And why is it broken into lines? Because it wants to be considered a poem? He then said, I don’t want to enjamb because it’s cute. So the prose block then. Within the prose block, there are other opportunites for caesurae: a tab space, or an underscore blank line also gives the pause effect when needed. So here we see his technical poetic concerns, his very deliberate choices, as he tells us very justifiably why he is against refinenent." - Barbara Jane Reyes
Excerpts from World Ball Notebook
Sesshu Foster, City Terrace Field Manual, Kaya/Muae, 1996)"Good Lord this book is dense, spiky, and ferocious. I am actually taking a break from it as we speak, after relishing in and wincing at the details of these broken human bodies; one split open at the ribcage, each half clamped down like butterfly wings “pinned to a sheet,” then stapled and sewed back up. This image actually reminds me of a whole raw roasting chicken before and after you cleave it. Another human body has his hand split in two by a stray chain from a chainsaw, his skin flapping aside and revealing yellow fat underneath.
Still, the point of Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual is survival in 20th century American city, its sprawl, and its margins, as migrant, as itinerant labor, as other: the undocumented agricultural worker, the interned Japanese. Not only are the streets and its denizens existing in various levels of repression, poverty, and depravity a threat to that survival, and not only are those in positions of power to repress and keep communities impoverished a threat to that survival; the work itself also poses a threat to human survival, as we see in the above image of the split open hand. The day laborer with no health insurance (or worker’s comp!) must pay how much for an ambulance ride to the ER, and for medical care. Then how long can he not work. And so the cash he’s supposed to earn for the work which costs him his hand doesn’t cover all these monetary costs.
So this “field manual” then, is a survival guide, which is supposed to provide us clean, procedural, detailed steps for living through every possible scenario. And while it’s not readily apparent how these blocks of narrative are “field manual,” I understand that perhaps such an easy and clean thing just isn’t possible. And perhaps Foster is also trying to tell us that bodily survival does not guarantee emotional or even spiritual survival.
Foster presents these stories, almost as if he’s transcribing these “I” stories his uncles, cousins, and homeboys are telling him at the kitchen table or hanging out in the garage. He presents them to us in these dense blocks of text. I see also how these blocks comprise a map of the city and its sprawl. I see how each apparently “small” story of an individual, comprises a larger (historical, collective, community) narrative.
And there are narratives here that seem to me as if the city machinery, and the city itself is speaking: “I pull into King Taco, Brooklyn & Soto, the doors of my face rapidly opening and closing, electric eye busted, insects crawling in and out of my ears.” And later: “The freeway thrashes, a snake fastened to my leg.” - Barbara Jane Reyes
"[On City Terrace Field Manual by Sesshu Foster (Kaya) and Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D.J. Waldie (Norton)]
From Nathaniel West and Raymond Chandler through Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion to Wanda Coleman and Mike Davis, among various lesser knowns, Los Angeles over the last six decades has bred an increasingly diverse and distinctive range of literary expression. It also seems only poetically just that Henry Miller and Anais Nin. those consummate egomythomaniacs, both found their way to L. A. in their later years just as Bukowski's star was rising as the new low-budget bard of the self-made self. Historian Carey McWilliams, in his classic study Southern California: An Island on the Land, observes that the L.A. region is a cultural exception within the larger exception of California as a whole, a geographically and psychologically isolated realm--and thus a microcosm of America--where escapist and adventurous individuals have traditionally migrated for the sake of reinventing themselves.
Idiosyncratic Los Angeles artists such as Sam Rodia and Ed Kienholtz, musicians like Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell, and authors like some of the above have engaged that tradition in their own ways by reinventing their respective forms. While the spectacles of the entertainment industry, celebrity scandals and natural disasters all lend a mythic or legendary air to mass-mediated versions of the Southland, equally vital in a wide-angle view of the city and its multiple cultures are narratives of the urban and suburban enclaves housing the people who work in the factories or wash the dishes in the region's restaurants. In recent years, the voices of these less visible communities have been rising to take a significant place in the L.A. literary landscape. Anthologies have proliferated, and books by uncelebrated local writers have found their way to the margins of the
marketplace.
In a barrio called City Terrace in East L.A., Sesshu Foster was writing and assembling pieces of his recently issued City Terrace Field Manual, a book which in its recombination of literary traditions begs the question of genre and extends the boundaries of existing poetic frontiers. In an intensely personal form of documentary prose poetry Foster offers a vivid
picture--or collage, or kaleidoscope slide show, or smashed-glass mosaic--of the territory where he spent most of his boyhood and to which he's remained connected both physically and emotionally ever since.
In their mixture of imaginative and nonfiction techniques. their blend of narrative and lyric elements, their musical forms and unconventional structures, even their almost identical lengths, Waldie's and Foster's books have much in common. Both are extraordinarily effective in conveying the texture and atmosphere of a very particular geographic setting; both narrator-protagonists are unheroic self-effacing recorders of local day-to-day life, even as they reveal their most intimate responses to what they've grown to know as normal; both exercise a crafty formal control, an economical compression which gives their writing tremendous resonance. In the days while reading and after finishing both these books, I couldn't stop thinking about them.
And yet in other ways Waldie's and Foster's books could hardly be more different from each other. While both writers have remained close to home (Waldie in the very house where he's lived since he was born) and made their living as public servants (Foster as a teacher in the public school system), their respective experiences and attitudes and systems of belief are worlds apart. Waldie is a practicing Catholic whose religious faith suffuses and informs an otherwise dispassionate account of his own
and his community's development; Foster is a political activist who dreams of and works for some kind of revolution that would correct the countless injustices so excruciatingly recorded in his book. Waldie serenely accepts the limits of his world and the tragic or pathetic failures of average humans to realize some greater accomplishment than quotidian survival, indeed,
perceives the pattern of that ordinariness as evidence of some greater, sacred order. Foster protests a social order thnt condemns his friends and family members and students to lives of poverty and violence and substance abuse and racist degradation even as he celebrates the near-miraculous vitality that enables the fortunate ones to endure and thrive. Waldie's style is cool, measured, almost detached in its commitment to an accurate factual representation of his material; Foster's is charged with furious heat, a spiky verbal salsa of percussive rhythms and cinematic jump cuts, sometimes restrained but always rippling with fiery energy.
(I should note here that in Foster's acknowledgments he thanks me, along with several other poets, "for supporting his work," by which I guess he means that in the course of our intermittent correspondence over the years I responded with admiration and encouragement to the pieces he sent me from the book in progress. My response to the finished product would be the same with or without that acknowledgment, or if I'd never before heard of the author.)
As its title implies, City Terrace Field Manual is a guide to survival in a combat zone--less a 'how-to' set of procedures than a record of experiences from which the writer/witness has somehow managed to emerge alive. Others he describes are not so lucky, having succumbed to or been gravely wounded by bullets, car crashes, incarceration, drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, police violence, on-the-job accidents and other forms of urban despair and mayhem. Yet this is not a work of sociology. Foster's eye and ear and nose for the looks and sounds and smells of the city are attuned to the specific sensations and personalities encountered and remembered in his tour of duty; he leaves it up to the reader to draw more general conclusions. The portraits he offers of high school buddies, girlfriends, students, neighborhood characters, parents and grandparents are fragmentary, anecdotal, not 'developed' as in a work of fiction, but the people in his pieces of stories are invoked with totally convincing vividness. These are not characters but human beings, drawn with a few quick strokes--emblematic individuals, figures in a bigger picture.
'Cindy didn't get any respect. The other kids didn't know she had already been shot three times. She was
twelve, and they called her "Bumperhead" because she had a big forehead above such light blue eyes. She had
a friendly smile, though like most gangbangers she paid no attention to me. The day she was kicked out of
school, she went down the hallways threatening other students. I stood at the door to the corridor, calling her
name. It was like she couldn't hear it. Later on, someone caught up with her, and she showed up at my desk with
a transfer form for me to sign. "Cindy, Cindy, Cindy," I said. But she didn't look at me or say anything. She
just fidgeted, waiting for me to sign her out.'
Structurally, Foster's Field Manual is an assemblage of fragments, untitled, unnumbered, that can be read in any order and which exhibit a great variation in tone, mood and mode, ranging from fairly straightforward narration to feverish lyrical delirium, from smoldering rage and baffled grief to tenderness and nostalgia from invocations of Lenin and Che Guevara to affectionate recollections of hapless cholos whose only revolutions were those of the rounds their cars made in the varrio. Whatever the mode, though, and whatever the length of the fragment/paragraph--from seven or eight lines to a couple of pages--Foster's writing sustains a relentless intensity that renders the texture of his world in a way that feels physically and emotionally
exhausting, oppressive and exhilarating at the same time. Saul Bellow once said of Dreiser that while his style was clumsy his attention to difficult detail gave his writing great "lifting power." Foster's style has a terrific agility--it isn't clumsy at all--and it's the seriousness of his unflinching vision combined with the snappy grace of his prose that lifts the heaviness of his material into a realm of almost giddy revelation.
I was the needle in the rain. I fell through years like a character in the Mayan calendar. I was the Chinese woman a floor below the street, bent over her machine in the dusty half-dark. I was the only white guy on the Mexican railroad crew, I was the breed who caught it from three sides. I was the one always on the out. I was the government worker piling slash after the logging
company had gone, knowing I was laid off when the job was done. I was the unknown artist sweating out images in a neighborhood garage. I was the guy whose only call came to sweep up at the factory, and I hurried to take it. I listened to the radio in the boarding house when everyone slept and heard a seagull calling in the middle of the night. At noon, I was the spots I saw high in the sun over the telephone poles.
I quote short sections--many of the longer ones have the kind of continuous firepower that singes your eyebrows--because the only way to get these pieces is in their entirety; but even in these few lines you can hear the tension between dismay and defiance that drives the rhythms in the poet's voice, and the Whitmanic self that both is and is not the author, identifying with his surroundings, moved to affirm the existence of even the humblest luckless nobody, to hear the lonesome unmusical yet somehow hopeful call of that unseen gull.
Ethnicity, nationality, class and 'race' play important roles in Foster's cosmology, not surprisingly when you consider that his father is revealed to be Anglo, his mother Japanese and his neighborhood predominantly Mexican. The father in Field Manual is all but missing, except when he turns up drunk in a rooming house or half dead in a hospital bed after open heart surgery or remembered sending foreign currency home to his son from some port where he's docked as a Merchant Marine, boozing it up and fucking the local whores; it's not what you'd call a reverent filial tribute, even though the bitterness of the portrait is tinged with a certain grudging forgiveness. The poet identifies more deeply with his mother, but she is scarcely seen as an individual, more as the child of any Japanese American family relocated in 1942 to one of the infamous detention camps. Culturally, Foster has the soul of a Chicano; the boyhood friends he invokes are mostly Latino; his language is salted with Spanish, touched with a black and blue affinity for Jimi Hendrixesque improvisational departures into hallucinatory consciousness-bending astronautical flights of song. In other words, he's American, multicultural to the core, as indebted to Hemingway as to Los Lobos, yet he cops to the identity of only half his heritage, the half that isn't quite 'white' If one were a Freudian rather than a Marxist, one might attribute the poet's third-world revolutionary fervor to certain unresolved issues with the father. But neither psychology nor politics can truthfully be reduced to such simple formulas. To Foster's credit, he engages neither in ideological diatribes nor in crybaby lamentations over victimhood or familial malfunction; he plays the hand he's been dealt with enormous reserves of spirit, creatively transforming the anger and grief of nasty circumstances into a paradoxical elation, a battle cry of undefeatedness.
Poison summer breeze, least likely to bring any relief but strangely it does; it's unexpected but I'll take it; the wrong wrench, the wrong socket set, the only thing you bring me makes the job take even longer--I'll take it in place of anything less; your glance, cheeks colored with sexual frustration and resentment; the broken end of a bottle waved in my face, two motherfuckers spitting out insults at the end of the day; skinny dog chained in a shityard of flies, chain crackling in the dry leaves; no one has anything to say that makes any sense, the families walking through heat waves at Evergreen Cemetery; raggedy-assed palm trees & friends who'd rather read magazines than try to think--hey, whatever, whatever is left; whatever you allow--you know what I'm saying-- I'll take it. (page 111)
Foster's first book, Angry Days (West End Press, 1987), was a strong collection of poems, yet for all its rage and accomplishment it yields nothing like the overall voltage of this masterfully sustained long-poem-in-prose. City Terrace Field Manual is a breakthrough, not just for the author but for anyone else in search of alternatives to tired forms." - Stephen Kessler
"The inside cover of Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual features a stark black-and-white photograph depicting skyscrapers on the smoggy Los Angeles horizon. But these buildings are not in the foreground. Instead, the majority of the frame is crammed with houses, houses that look as if they’ve seen better days. From the vantage point of these ghetto dwellings, the big buildings, the centers of wealth and power, seem miles away.Reading this 1996 Foster collection is like being inserted into that photograph. He writes from the perspective of an outsider, a man who understands what race and class conflicts have done to the city he grew up in, and yet refuses to let bitterness overtake him. UC-Santa Cruz, and our creative writing program specifically, are privileged to count him as an alumnus. It seems difficult to say where this book would be shelved in your local bookstore: fiction, poetry, autobiography? City Terrace Field Manual defies classification, it is all three of those genres at once. The reader is presented with 167 vignettes of the author’s life, growing up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of City Terrace. Despite the constant blurring between fact and fiction, it becomes clear over the course of the book that Foster is of mixed Japanese, Latin American, and Caucasian heritage, although it appears that City Terrace is a predominantly Latino neighborhood. As a narrator, he seems to identify most closely with that Latino side of himself, while never turning his back on the other ethnic roots which give his life more complexity and richness. For example, in the fragment beginning “Why black is in style,” Foster declares:
'Los Angeles is my city, I sucked on her neck, gave her purple hickeys before she backhanded me out a car at 35 MPH on a turn in Highland Park. From a street corner, all the Chinese signs in Alhambra declare her love. Korean signs of Koreatown are just another word for feelings. Beautiful hair of Vietnamese noodles. Wonderful smile of oranges sold at East L.A. on-ramps. Big bottles of pigs feet & giant kosher dills on the counter at every corner store.' (51)
The celebratory and embracing style of the writing is immediately evident, despite the grittiness and violence which also pervades the book. Foster has a truly modern, realistic grasp as a writer on California, a state which becomes more like its own nation every day, a nation of immigrants and many languages. Placing pigs feet next to Vietnamese noodles is an odd, jarring pastiche, but it works.This brings up the overall disjointedness of Foster’s narrative, which cannot really be called a narrative at all. Instead, we get episodes, moments in time that are remembered sometimes with aching attention to detail, sometimes with hazy, stream-of-consciousness thought-pictures. This presentation seems intentional on Foster’s part: a life is being displayed before the reader which cannot be told in a simple, linear narrative common to most Western fiction. Here, the poetic side of his work takes over, offering an escape from stale forms, dragging us by the hand into a world rich with contradictions and complexities.And what a world it is. One of the greatest pleasures in reading City Terrace Field Manual is the way his prose assaults the five senses. In the fragment beginning “Hey, Manny,” the author reflects: The Texaco on Eastern burned down, where Ernie the wino once lived. Remember his face, fried like chorizo, cracked in the morning sun? His clothes greasy black, stretching his hand out to us on our way to school. He looked like that all the time, then one day he puked his guts out and lay face down in black blood. (9)
It is harrowing details such as these, so vivid it almost seems they can’t be fiction, which give this work its lifeblood. Foster tells it like he sees it; there is no time for philosophizing or sermonizing to the reader. He lets the memories speak for themselves.
Memory plays a huge role in how Foster tells his small stories. Most of the fragments are related in past tense, some in present, but never in future. This again seems to be a conscious artistic decision: it is as though in a neighborhood as tough as City Terrace, the only thing that matters is right now, and what got us to that moment. The future can wait until tomorrow. Foster underscores this dependency on the past with multiple references to photographs, such as “Orale, carnal, check out this photograph I found: it’s from the old days out in the desert! What bad-ass dudes!” (163). While it is unclear whether the voice employed here is Foster’s own or that of a friend, we get the feeling of a cluster of homeboys gathering around, peering at a yellowed photo and laughing as it resurrects old memories, some pleasant, some not. And although there is no cohesive narrative to the book, memory does provide some of the few threads which patch it together. For example, the phrase “the thin knife edge of light in dead flies on the windowsill” is first voiced on page 14 and then repeated in the seemingly unrelated fragment on page 161. Such lacing of evocative language throughout causes the reader to question the nature of memory itself, and Foster’s reasons in presenting it this way.
Another memory which permeates the text is a memory of revolution. This is not necessarily revolution on a grand, national scale, but more often little revolutions which the author observed and even instigated in his own barrio. Foster cleverly invokes the Filipino revolutionary writer Carlos Bulosan when on the page 32 fragment, he states: “America is in the Heart and we are in the canebrake, we do not want to see St. Quentin again.” By name-checking Bulosan’s famous novel of immigration and awakening to a radical consciousness, Foster asks the reader just how far revolution for America’s impoverished racial minorities has come since Bulosan was writing in the 1940′s. This doubting of the power of activism continues in the book’s longest fragment, which begins “Maria Altamirando was our community spokesperson” (117). In very straightforward language, Foster details to the reader how the work of his local, predominantly Hispanic chapter of the Progressive Anti-War Organization (PAO) was undermined by uncaring white leadership in Washington D.C. Included in this story is the tale of Maria Altamirando, whom Foster portrays as “selling out” a bit to claim a leadership role within the PAO organization. He comments on her ascension out of LA later in the fragment: “And I wonder what she’s doing far away across the country, over there in the capital, surrounded by white folks and politicians” (120). It is interesting here how Foster maintains the revolutionary fervor of Bulosan without succumbing to that man’s misogynist slant (in his vitriolic depiction of union organizer Helen, for example). Foster seems to recognize that ultimately race and gender intersect in more subtle ways than Bulosan could have imagined, and that sometimes the rise of an individual must take precedence over the dreams of a community. He doesn’t seem to have hate in his heart for Maria, only a sense of wonder as to how she could have succeeded when so many others have failed.
Finally, as with Bulosan, Foster remembers youth. His teenage years form a good portion of these fragments, and he captures lovingly the confusions of being young in a world of backbreaking landscape work, hot dirty skies, and gang warfare. In an evocation of these themes, he writes: “the families walking through heat waves at Evergreen Cemetery; ragged-assed palm trees & friends who’d rather read magazines than try to think–hey, whatever, whatever is left; whatever you allow–you know what I’m saying–I’ll take it” (111). This kind of desperation, a sort of grasping for an identity in a fractured world, are at the heart of this book. The passage above captures those feelings when they are clouded by teenage angst, but in the final, extremely moving fragment, Foster clarifies the meaning of another childhood incident:
'My dad floats a world away on his shining fucking sea and a cop confiscates the Swiss army knife he sent me for my birthday. The cop loves the knife, he smiles as he puts it in his pocket; “Kids like you are not allowed to carry knives.” Because of that, I despise my dad more than I hate the cops.' (168)
We are chilled, as the author can look back on such a story with enough analytical power to make sense of it all, to realize that hatred from the white race only brings on more hatred within the communities they oppress. This careful portrait of internalized racial fury puts Foster in the company of such luminaries as Toni Morrison, who have spent careers dissecting what he states so bluntly (and so well) in just a few lines. Such is the amazing power when poetry and prose are combined, and when a writer has the courage to look at childhood outside the maudlin, idealized model many slip into. Instead, Foster takes on his formative years with the true grit and ambiguity that was really there, and from that experience creates powerful, socially-relevant art.The title of this work, City Terrace Field Manual, is paradoxical: it fits and it doesn’t fit. On the one hand, the book does not give instructions for living in such a harsh environment, as the word manual might suggest. In fact, it seems to raise more questions than it answers. But on the other hand, like any good field guide, Foster’s book gives the reader an wholly unique, wholly immersive feel for the landscape of City Terrace. In those nauseating details, we are right there with him, walking along the cracked asphalt, choking on the smog–bringing to life Foster’s reminder: “I exist. That means trouble” (37). City Terrace Field Manual is searing and shot through with sunlight, and it cannot be ignored." - Jason Kirby
Additional Selections from City Terrace Field Manual
