In the alternate universe of this glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is visited by visions of a parallel world run by the Europeans, where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with automatic weapons, totemic powers and blood sacrifice conquer and colonize 1940s Europe, as ghosts of the world wars emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles.
Atomik Aztex is a hilarious read. A potent concoction, with influences from graphic novels, along with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the paranoia of Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs, and an outrageous cyber-Aztlán mix reminiscent of Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
Sesshu Foster is the author of the critically acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual.

Atomik Aztex

Literature & Fiction

Foster, Sesshu

United States

City Lights Publishers

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.

World Ball Notebook

Poetry

A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes. "Foster and Romo's 'real fake dream' of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a superb and loving phantasmagoria that gobbles up real histories for breakfast and spits out the seeds."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles--some as large as one thousand feet long--was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster. Written and presented as an "actual history of a fictional company," this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum. "Poet Foster (Atomik Aztex) and artist Romo deliver a maddeningly accomplished inquiry into the secret history of East Los Angeles. . . .&nbsp;This is as much fun to read as it must have been to make."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "One of the wildest, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I've read in years, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology is to experience, in the finest sense, literature as fever dream."--Omar El Akkad, author of American War: A Novel "Visionary, hilarious, anarchic, this assemblage of breakneck dialog, blisteringly brilliant film criticism, bureaucratic documents, revolutionary chatter, mass transit, and fake dreams of the secret police, is the counterfactual novel to beat all counterfactual novels."--Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha "Hilarious and prophetic and profound, truer than truth, and realer than all realities currently available for purchase, ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come. This book combats despair."--Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines

Romo, Arturo Ernesto

Humor & Satire

Angry Days

West End Press

Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry

Clinton, Michelle T.

West End Pr

Brawling, street-wise prose poems push the boundaries of narrative form, taking the reader through the physical and psychological landscapes of East Los Angeles.

City Terrace Field Manual (Composers; 3)

Kaya/Muae

In the alternate universe of Sesshu Foster's glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs have conquered the European invaders, launching into the world its own culture of totemic powers and blood sacrifices. Zenzontli, the Keeper of the House of Darkness, has fits and visions of a world where things are run by the Europeans, and where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with fully automatic weapons and ancient totemic powers conquer and colonize 1940s Europe in Cinemascope and Technicolor, as ghosts of the 20th century world wars emerge from the Farmer John Meat Packing Plant to haunt a contemporary Los Angeles.  Sesshu Foster is dangerous,"ese!" The way a poet should be." --Luis J. Rodriguez Sesshu Foster startles you, surprises you, even shocks you; his writing sparkles with new insights and images; at the same time, he engages you in the context of continuing history and you realize you're in what could be familiar territory: "Ah, yes--how it is!" --Lawson Fusao Inada  6 x 9 in.

Literary

Kaya Production

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.”
Poet, teacher and community activist Sesshu Foster (born 1957) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing and community organizing. His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the speculative-fiction novel Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers.

City of the Future

Kaya Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Foster, Sesshu. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Foster, Sesshu

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Foster, Sesshu. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Atomik Aztex

World Ball Notebook

ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines

Angry Days

Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry

City Terrace Field Manual (Composers; 3)

Atomik Aztex

City of the Future