Book Description from the Publisher's Web PageThe 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 scuff ed LA field, its goal lines swirling, nets strung loosely between daylight and the spirit world—Sesshu Foster’s inimitably fierce and powerfully evocative mix of the fantastic and the mundane.Comments from the Publisher's Web Page"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, author of Borrowed Love Poems
"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."
"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...'"
"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."
"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." Background on Sesshu FosterSesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He's also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark's Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook. |
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