World Ball Notebook

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