City Terrace Field Manual

Foster's breakthrough collection of prose poetry is a hymn to the collective memory of Los Angeles that "corrals the mundane and the serious into a single tight space" (Tracy K. Smith, former US Poet Laureate)

Described by legendary Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman as "the best since Kerouac and beyond" and by the San Francisco Bay Guardian as "pure California mainlined straight into language that sears the skin off 99 percent of what purports to be literary competence," Sesshu Foster's (born 1957) landmark collection of prose poetry, City Terrace Field Manual, maps the physical and psychological terrain of the predominantly Chicano neighborhood in Los Angeles where he grew up. LA's explosive past becomes its eternal present in this guide to reading the face of a neighborhood--its histories and inhabitants, landmarks and wars. Foster's formally and substantively inventive prose poems describe the multiplicity, double vision and explosive tension that lead from the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans to warfare on the streets of Watts and Koreatown to the frustrated anger of a boy punching out factory windows with his bare fists. This new, expanded edition provides visual maps to accompany Foster's words, and celebrates the impact his book has had by including original writings by Karen Tei Yamashita and others in response to Foster's poetic provocations.