World Ball Notebook

by Sesshu Foster

Overview

Winner of the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards in Poetry and 2010 American Book Award

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—Sesshu Foster’s inimitably fierce and powerfully evocative mix of the fantastic and the mundane.

World Ball Notebook is a hybrid genre mixed text, composed of extracts from travel notebooks, email poems, postcard jottings, letters and blog posts, a record of the written moment compiled, refracted, prismatic.

Poet Sesshu Foster is the author of the highly acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual and Atomic Aztex, a novel.

"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

"World Ball Notebook is Sesshu Foster's breakthrough book, in which he raises the trenchant deadpan observations of City Terrance Field Manual and the alternative-universe hijinks of Atomik Aztex to a new and even more potent level. (Beware, dear reader: the contents of this book are radioactive.) Always surprising and incisive, Foster now finds the marvelous in the ordinary, banal, and abject, and, in the words that dance and tremble, he conveys the sheer (and often terrifying) wonder that one is alive in a weird and terrible 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 a chance to see the world this way."—John Yau

Sesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East LA for twenty years. He won the 2010 American Book Award for World Ball Notebook, the 2009 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry for World Ball Notebook, the 2005 Believer Book Award for Atomik Aztex, the 1990 American Book Award for Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry, and was a finalist for a PEN Center West Poetry Prize and for the Paterson Poetry Prize for City Terrace Field Manual.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872864672
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	01/01/2009
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Sesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East L.A. for over 20 years, and at the Universityof Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and the Universityof California, Santa Cruz. His work is 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. His most recent novel is Eladatl: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines with Arturo Ernesto Romo, published by City Lights. His previous books include the novel Atomik Aztex and the poetry collection World Ball Notebook, both with City Lights, as well as City of the Future and City Terrace Field Manual. A celebrated writer, his literary awards are numerous: Sesshu was awarded the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry for World Ball Notebook; the Believer Book Award for Atomik Aztex; an American Book Award for Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry; and finalist for the PEN Center West Poetry Prize, as well as the Paterson Poetry Prize, for City Terrace Field Manual. Sesshu is based in Alhambra, CA.

What People are Saying About This

Rigoberto Gonzalez

"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 Aztek, 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: Blog of the National Book Critics Circle)

Hal Niedzviecki

"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)

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"[Foster] is playful, and of course we see this in the game format of the this book, i.e. each poem is a 'game'. . . Optometry questionnaires and Trader Joe's grocery lists, internet memes are all a part of that world of soccer games, giving his daughter rides to the wrong airport during LA rush hour gridlock traffic, standing in line at the DMV for hours and having a crappy or dorky driver's license picture to commemorate those many hours in the DMV line, and so the poetic forms he uses also have range, as does the book's emotional content."—Barbara Jane Reyes, Poeta y Diwata

From the Publisher

“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

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.

Poetry Project Newsletter

Foster divides World Ball Notebook into 118 "Games" and begins with special thanks to his daughters' soccer coach. But his prose poems, letter-poems, checklists, shopping lists, and overheard conversations are not about soccer, exactly. Rather, they emulate soccer: they are global, tachycardic, and filled with lightning-swift exchanges.
Standout poems like Game 101 combine road-trip fog with political
statement: "when the officer of the state patrol asks you to step out of the vehicle you translate this to mean, I feel it, I too feel I must vomit . . . " 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

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

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.

Bloomsbury Review