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scoutthepages's review against another edition
2.0
Review at https://pragmastery.com/2019/10/14/2019-book-overview-part1/
luisasm's review against another edition
4.0
I actually really liked this collection. It's true that many of them are difficult to decipher, and that a huge number of them rely on inside references to City Terrace itself and to the author's experiences. And they are very, very abstract. Do not expect traditional poetry. A few of them were baffling enough that I had to skim and move on. But when you really look at some of them, there's so much to find, although it will take some work. They are clearly carefully crafted, full of really powerful metaphors or just creative imagery and description. As long as you go in with an open mind and a dedication to figuring these poems out, you'll find something to like in here.
robhendricks's review
4.0
Two things seem to matter most in Sesshu Foster’s poems. 1) The lives and grisly deaths (the fate, really) of the people he has known and loved in his community in East LA. 2) The making of a writerly presence -- the figure and voice of “Sesshu Foster the writer,” beyond the historical instances of Sesshu Foster the person in time.
Amongst other things, this book is an unabashed -- resolute, joyful even -- catalog of violences. Disfigurements, dismemberments, attacks, horrible death upon death, descriptions of car crashes, shootings and beatings, gruesome workplace accidents, plus all the miraculous near-misses, constitute perhaps the core subject driving this work. Not a celebration of the violence, and yet, the persona narrator that presides over these accounts unfolds the devastation with relish, with an air of hard-boiled wonder, so that the accounts snowball together into a kind of blunted amazement that anyone at all has lived to sing these tales, let alone he himself. It is a book of bloodied, mangled wonderment. If history is a rosary of innumerable and outrageous violences, culture is figured in Foster’s book as an incredible gift of survival, emergent wisdom, and precarious connection for which he gives thanks from within his context of proliferating insufficiencies, performing writerliness as character, always from within the community.
The range of tone and music in this Sesshu Foster voice is limited by its adherences to the community, and yet it presses at the edges of what’s plausible in its context, pulling in manic and surreal Nerudan gestures of dislocation and ecstasy, and establishing an other-wordly strangeness by pressing the language of damage, of rending flesh, of blows, of collisions, of bent steel and broken bodies, into rapturous grooves. Foster provisionally wields language as narrative most of the time, but he does so in order to create a world of meaning by accumulating a reservoir of characters, settings, and typical scenarios. I think he uses the anecdotal material to deepen the grooves of concern he wants to feel into. The book does not follow a temporal arc. The miniplots of City Terrace Field Manual are cyclical, thematic, repetitive, reinforced by ebbtides of miniature stories, lyrical breakdowns, and intermittent surreal riffs of psychosis candy. It pretty much always feels crystal clear to me that this work is dedicated in service to the community, even when it is breaking down into more chthonic layers of linguistic play. I sense that this work is continuously performing celebration and mourning on behalf of its subjects, their preciousness in the writer’s eyes, his deep solidarity with them, mulling through triumphs and losses. It does not feel that this work is serving the mysteries of language, for example, or some other aesthetic ideal, or stepping into an exploratory space that forfends decisions or commitments in the world in order to discover new ways of registering meaning. Sesshu Foster overtly characterizes his persona narrator as a love-driven figure devoted to very specific beloved people and places above all else. This persona narrator is a performance of the writer “Sesshu,” who we are made to imagine in back of the poems. In back of the quiet observant boy, or the reckless lucky kid, or the trenchant activist adult who sometimes appear embroiled as characters, as points-of-view within them, there is another made character persona voicing the work. All the poems seem to be equally dedicated to a host of characters, and to the meaning of their lives in place, in City Terrace. The agreement of self-portraiture and felt intention within the work as a whole combine to generate an aura of deep integrity and authenticity around the performance of voice.
I felt that this work shows a lot of respect for character. For the patience and faith, courage implicit in any continuous effort to keep showing up for others amidst adversities. This respect for character seems to orient the voice and vision of City Terrace Field Manual. For example, the poem on pg. 157 that begins “I never got anywhere by skill, talent…” This poem nails down the deep values that inform Foster’s work. To have not gotten lucky in the cards that are dealt, not running on smarts, or good looks, or carelessly acting out. Nothing for free, nothing taken for granted, but rather, “If I was the one who slept in your arms, it was because I was the one who waited. If you were watching out for me, it was because I was the one who was faithful.” And even good luck itself is not taken for granted, such as when “Rebar two or three feet high failed to impale me on all sides” (169). In this case as elsewhere, this good luck is not some patrimony, not tied to the “lucky Chinese coins with holes useless in my pocket,” received from his deadbeat white father, but a wonder, a miracle of his survival.
Amongst other things, this book is an unabashed -- resolute, joyful even -- catalog of violences. Disfigurements, dismemberments, attacks, horrible death upon death, descriptions of car crashes, shootings and beatings, gruesome workplace accidents, plus all the miraculous near-misses, constitute perhaps the core subject driving this work. Not a celebration of the violence, and yet, the persona narrator that presides over these accounts unfolds the devastation with relish, with an air of hard-boiled wonder, so that the accounts snowball together into a kind of blunted amazement that anyone at all has lived to sing these tales, let alone he himself. It is a book of bloodied, mangled wonderment. If history is a rosary of innumerable and outrageous violences, culture is figured in Foster’s book as an incredible gift of survival, emergent wisdom, and precarious connection for which he gives thanks from within his context of proliferating insufficiencies, performing writerliness as character, always from within the community.
The range of tone and music in this Sesshu Foster voice is limited by its adherences to the community, and yet it presses at the edges of what’s plausible in its context, pulling in manic and surreal Nerudan gestures of dislocation and ecstasy, and establishing an other-wordly strangeness by pressing the language of damage, of rending flesh, of blows, of collisions, of bent steel and broken bodies, into rapturous grooves. Foster provisionally wields language as narrative most of the time, but he does so in order to create a world of meaning by accumulating a reservoir of characters, settings, and typical scenarios. I think he uses the anecdotal material to deepen the grooves of concern he wants to feel into. The book does not follow a temporal arc. The miniplots of City Terrace Field Manual are cyclical, thematic, repetitive, reinforced by ebbtides of miniature stories, lyrical breakdowns, and intermittent surreal riffs of psychosis candy. It pretty much always feels crystal clear to me that this work is dedicated in service to the community, even when it is breaking down into more chthonic layers of linguistic play. I sense that this work is continuously performing celebration and mourning on behalf of its subjects, their preciousness in the writer’s eyes, his deep solidarity with them, mulling through triumphs and losses. It does not feel that this work is serving the mysteries of language, for example, or some other aesthetic ideal, or stepping into an exploratory space that forfends decisions or commitments in the world in order to discover new ways of registering meaning. Sesshu Foster overtly characterizes his persona narrator as a love-driven figure devoted to very specific beloved people and places above all else. This persona narrator is a performance of the writer “Sesshu,” who we are made to imagine in back of the poems. In back of the quiet observant boy, or the reckless lucky kid, or the trenchant activist adult who sometimes appear embroiled as characters, as points-of-view within them, there is another made character persona voicing the work. All the poems seem to be equally dedicated to a host of characters, and to the meaning of their lives in place, in City Terrace. The agreement of self-portraiture and felt intention within the work as a whole combine to generate an aura of deep integrity and authenticity around the performance of voice.
I felt that this work shows a lot of respect for character. For the patience and faith, courage implicit in any continuous effort to keep showing up for others amidst adversities. This respect for character seems to orient the voice and vision of City Terrace Field Manual. For example, the poem on pg. 157 that begins “I never got anywhere by skill, talent…” This poem nails down the deep values that inform Foster’s work. To have not gotten lucky in the cards that are dealt, not running on smarts, or good looks, or carelessly acting out. Nothing for free, nothing taken for granted, but rather, “If I was the one who slept in your arms, it was because I was the one who waited. If you were watching out for me, it was because I was the one who was faithful.” And even good luck itself is not taken for granted, such as when “Rebar two or three feet high failed to impale me on all sides” (169). In this case as elsewhere, this good luck is not some patrimony, not tied to the “lucky Chinese coins with holes useless in my pocket,” received from his deadbeat white father, but a wonder, a miracle of his survival.
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