<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>World Ball Notebook</TitleText>

City Lights Books onix@onixsuite.com 20130217 eng

GCDS-9780872864672 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100793060 02 0872864677 03 9780872864672 15 9780872864672 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>World Ball Notebook</TitleText> 1 A01 Foster, Sesshu Sesshu Foster Sesshu 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 <a target="blank" href="http://www.salon.com">www.salon.com</a> and local readings are archived at <a target="blank" href="http://www.sicklyseason.com">www.sicklyseason.com</a>. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, <a target="blank" href="http://www.ELAguide.org">www.ELAguide.org</a>. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook.Visit his blog, <a target="blank" href="http://atomikaztex.wordpress.com/">East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines</a>. 01 eng 96 01 Winner of a 2010 American Book Award and the 2009 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry "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 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.Visit Sesshu Foster's blog, East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines.Listen to a podcast of poet Sesshu Foster reading from his eclectic World Ball Notebook, recorded at City Lights on April 29, 2009, under our podcast home page.Praise for Sesshu Foster's World Ball Notebook:"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." -Wanda Coleman, poet and writer, Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales "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, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics"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, author of 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border and Thunderweavers / Tejedoras de Rayos. "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, author of Music and Suicide and The Little Door Slides Back  Praise for Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex: "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 Starred Review ". . . A book so heedlessly imaginative it often seems ready to burst its pages like a comic-book POW." -Bookforum 02 A genre-breaking adventure: narrative prose poems filled with awe, yearning, acerbic wit, and crystalline observations. 08 "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 Critical Mass 08 "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 Broken Pencil 08 "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 Pleiades 08 "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." -Ray Gonzalez, March/April 2009 Bloomsbury Review 08 "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." University of Arizona Poetry Center 08 <div>"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."</div> Poetry Project 08 "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 04 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100793060/images/87286100793060L.gif 07 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100793060/images/87286100793060S.gif 23 01 http://www.youtube.com/v/jqW6--ZdWGw&hl=en&fs=1&border=1 http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100793060 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20090105 08 16 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20090105 01 02 13.95 USD