City Terrace Field Manual

by Sesshu Foster

184pp | 1996 | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030191

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

“Now firmly ensconced in the L.A. canon, City Terrace is a frank exploration of the poet’s Eastside youth, one shaped by political and personal unrest but also deep love.” —Los Angeles Times

“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

“‘City Terrace Field Manual,’ is considered one of the greatest works ever composed about the Eastside. Foster’s work paved the way for a whole generation of Eastside poets.” —PBS SoCal

“Sesshu Foster’s new book of prose poems, City Terrace Field Manual, hits hard; it has the heart and feel of poetry, but it is also a manual for urban survival as we enter the millennium. . . . Foster’s language has an energetic, headstrong quality.” —International Examiner

“Foster assembles a noisy mosaic of impressions and bittersweet homages that ultimately shows us what it means to be a socially committed poet in the waning years of the 20th century. . . . The result is a tour de force of rhythmic invention that gains power and meaning through accumulation.” —Asianweek

“[Foster’s] poems retain a strange power. In a world where anonymity means neglect and despair, he is not simply an unseen, neutral observer. In his vision of the city, he provides an unsentimental, graphic, and powerful collective human portrait.” —A. Magazine

awards

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