Description
Poetry. Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster's CITY TERRACE FIELD MANUAL, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster's childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis.
These poems are, in the poet's words: "Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation 'Wish You Were Here' postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can't live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can't live here now; you must live in the future, in the CITY OF THE FUTURE."
Author Bio
Poet, teacher, and community activist Sesshu Foster grew up in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of the poetry collections CITY TERRACE FIELD MANUAL (Kaya Press, 1996), American Loneliness: Selected Poems (2006), WORLD BALL NOTEBOOK (2009), which won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, and CITY OF THE FUTURE (2018). Foster is the author of the novel of speculative fiction ATOMIK AZTEX (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers. Foster's work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000), Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008), and STATE OF THE UNION: 50 POLITICAL POEMS (2008). He co-edited the anthology Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry (1989). Foster has taught in East LA for 25 years as well as at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Pomona University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He lives in Los Angeles.
Author City: Los Angeles, CA USA