City Terrace Field Manual

by Sesshu Foster

184pp | 1996 | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030191

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In this powerful collection of prose poetry, Sesshu Foster maps the physical and psychological terrain of his childhood home, the predominantly Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles known as City Terrace. More than a tour through a bleak and burnt out landscape, however, City Terrace Field Manual is a guide to reading the face of a neighborhood — its histories and inhabitants, landmarks and wars. Haunted by L.A.’s explosive past, these vignettes and poetic riffs trace the lines of violence, racism, and neglect that lead from the World War II internment of Japanese Americans to the warfare on the streets of Watts and Koreatown to the frustrated anger of a boy punching out factory windows with his bare fists. Foster’s poems push the boundaries of form and language, embodying the multiplicity, the double vision, and the explosive tension at the heart of the urban edge.

praise

“This is pure California mainlined straight into language that sears the skin off 99 percent of what purports to be literary competence. In a just world, Foster would be selling millions of copies of his beautiful accomplishment, but the world’s not just, as the book’s brilliant, crystalline pieces make plain, and that’s why he’s writing and why you should hear him and buy his book.”
— San Francisco Bay Guardian

“This stuff is crackling! Foster’s brilliant eye for the essentially human and his crisp blue-collar imagery create an important, powerful, moving prosody—the best since Kerouac and beyond.”
— Wanda Coleman

“I thank Sesshu Foster for detailing the poetic soundtrack of a people and a place, of their history and their dreams. I know these streets, these images, these songs and voices; they reverberate inside me still, taking me back to the concrete river, the City Terrace topography. Sesshu Foster is dangerous, ese! The way a poet should be.”
— Luis J. Rodriguez

“Sesshu Foster startles you, surprises you, even shocks you; his writing sparkles with new insights and images; at the same time, he engages you in the context of continuing history and you realize you’re in what could be familiar territory: ‘Ah, yes–how it is!'”
— Lawson Fusao Inada

awards

Winner, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award
Finalist, PEN West Literary Award