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Sojourner
Sojourner gathers short stories, poems, experiments, and prose poems from the author’s 25 years spent traveling, sojourning, and then residing in various US and European cities. Each of the multiform texts of Sojourner seek to engage the mystery of our experience of place, our sense of belonging, and our desire to escape into unknown territories. Of the many voices included in the collection, we hear from teenagers in obscure California suburbs, San Francisco apartment hunters and soon-to-be-unfaithful boyfriends, European backpackers, junkies, prostitutes, South American refugees, mourners in Texas, revolutionaries in Brooklyn, dreaming Manhattan barflies, Arctic lovers, victims of Vesuvian politics and Partenopean trash bags, a re-figuration of Poe’s amontillado-tippling Fortunato, Florentine ghosts, Tuscan expatriates lost in summertime reveries, and the Mad Hatnik in Poznan, Poland, along with his evil doppleganger and imaginary accomplice. There is a free-to-download CD of performances of texts from _Sojourner_ at https://soundcloud.com/lee-foust/sets...
179 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
27 people want to read
About the author
Lee Foust
11 books214 followersI am an author, raconteur, and performer, i come from California with a drum on my back, i live in Naples, Italy, the sun's so hot i froze to death and i want to write a story that will make you cry if you will only listen, oh.
http://www.leefoust.com/index.html
http://leefoust.blogspot.com/
http://www.leefoust.com/index.html
http://leefoust.blogspot.com/
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 28, 2013
I've had the pleasure of reading some of these tales, poems and rants repeatedly over the years and watching them amass here and finally be published is a great relief in that a voice releases itself in many voices and the opportunity emerges for everyone to find them in one place opening up into many places and yet held within one's firm grasp as the ride throws you back and forth. It's the grasp of the many idioms here, not alone the languages, that feels along the borders of cities and meets you inside their crumbling and struggling human fortresses, the lapidary leaping over many walls, the scrapes with junkies, the search for homes, the foreigner inside the self, and the nooks in which loves are found, destroyed, scattered, pieced back together, never ever to be whole again, but humanly capable of taking the next step, after all. "Ash Wednesday" comes first to mind as a frightening, erudite sociological horror story about both cultural alienation and rivalry set in some nearly Medieval Venetian snare that symbolizes all too cannily contemporary intrigue. It would take too long to comment on the many other texts and their fascinating temporal oneiric convolutions and deflective humorism so I prefer to cite the opener I have here to hand. "I dreamed I lay in an opium den in the Mission District/of San Francisco last night, drinking a bottle of Scotch/I fell asleep and was awakened/by a belligerent gang of teenagers spoiling for a fight/Instead of fighting/I threw a roll of sourdough bread onto Valencia Street/An ugly water glass fell over and smashed/all of my delicate and beautiful champagne and martini glasses/Then I had to pay up and go home." Such are the illusions of traveling, not to mention of being seduced by the dream of living, abroad, anywhere, when one has to continually deal with catching the bus back to the bed inside one's own head. Think about it: one persons "abroad" is another person's home. Then you take that trip from which you never can return.
March 23, 2015
I'm a huge fan of his work in general. This book is intelligent, bold, and is so descriptive you feel like you're watching the entire thing unfold in front of you. I'm looking forward to the next book.
July 20, 2013
I feel like I have just returned from travelling, full of all the wonders I saw, and the flip side of life that can bring us down.
Such is the way this book of poems, short stories and other gems affects the reader. As it is an anthology of different writing styles by the same Author, there are no characters to dissect or explain; no plot that needs to be waded through, just the unadulterated pleasure of reading words artfully and expertly strung together in a manner that will touch all readers in some fashion. The covers both front and back, are endowed with beautiful glossy photographs, that make you immediately know that this book is going to be something quite extraordinary, and worth your time to investigate.
‘House Hunting’, the first short in this anthology, sets the scene delightfully for what is to come as we travel the world with, and experience it through, the writers’ eyes. And, a story most of us can relate to as we try to find our own ‘castle’ in the world. ‘Sparagmos’ takes us a whole new direction, as do most of the pages as the reader turns them, and was my favourite prose poem in the book. Another favourite of mine, was ‘American Cemetery’. Having visited several of these while we were living in Europe it was easy to feel the underlying conflict between beliefs and decency, an indication of just how well this outstanding collection is written. As always when visiting one of these sites, I take the time to reflect over what has gone, and what we have now; this is also captured well in the lines of the piece and made me take a few moments in its reading for some gentle meditation on the aspects of war.
There is not much I can say about this collection, without going through it here page by page, and then nullifying any need you have to read it for yourself, and you do need to read it for yourself. There are pieces that will offend the overly sensitive, but there always is in good writing; this is good writing. It is full of hope, despair, horror, humour and seduction. Most of the contents are easily understandable upon the first read but, like an onion, they contain several levels and it is worth the time to revisit them and gradually peel those levels away.
I am highly recommending this to anyone who likes short stories, poems or just exploring something new. I have carried this in my messenger bag from the day I first opened its covers to dip in and out of when I had a break in my schedule, and will probably continue to do so until it falls to pieces, maybe I need to buy another copy for when this day comes, as every time I read something it contains, I find a new viewpoint that I hadn't considered before.
Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.wordpress.com/...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Such is the way this book of poems, short stories and other gems affects the reader. As it is an anthology of different writing styles by the same Author, there are no characters to dissect or explain; no plot that needs to be waded through, just the unadulterated pleasure of reading words artfully and expertly strung together in a manner that will touch all readers in some fashion. The covers both front and back, are endowed with beautiful glossy photographs, that make you immediately know that this book is going to be something quite extraordinary, and worth your time to investigate.
‘House Hunting’, the first short in this anthology, sets the scene delightfully for what is to come as we travel the world with, and experience it through, the writers’ eyes. And, a story most of us can relate to as we try to find our own ‘castle’ in the world. ‘Sparagmos’ takes us a whole new direction, as do most of the pages as the reader turns them, and was my favourite prose poem in the book. Another favourite of mine, was ‘American Cemetery’. Having visited several of these while we were living in Europe it was easy to feel the underlying conflict between beliefs and decency, an indication of just how well this outstanding collection is written. As always when visiting one of these sites, I take the time to reflect over what has gone, and what we have now; this is also captured well in the lines of the piece and made me take a few moments in its reading for some gentle meditation on the aspects of war.
There is not much I can say about this collection, without going through it here page by page, and then nullifying any need you have to read it for yourself, and you do need to read it for yourself. There are pieces that will offend the overly sensitive, but there always is in good writing; this is good writing. It is full of hope, despair, horror, humour and seduction. Most of the contents are easily understandable upon the first read but, like an onion, they contain several levels and it is worth the time to revisit them and gradually peel those levels away.
I am highly recommending this to anyone who likes short stories, poems or just exploring something new. I have carried this in my messenger bag from the day I first opened its covers to dip in and out of when I had a break in my schedule, and will probably continue to do so until it falls to pieces, maybe I need to buy another copy for when this day comes, as every time I read something it contains, I find a new viewpoint that I hadn't considered before.
Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.wordpress.com/...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
July 17, 2016
Sojourner is the creation of a hybrid soul, one who brings us on a hip expat's gritty journey through transatlantic heaven and hell; Lee is both Virgil and Henry Miller, guiding us through the circles of Amsterdam canals, the red light district, "Beatrice in Purgatory," and through ascension and oblivion in lovers' arms.
With an erudite punk rock sensibility, Lee writes of belonging nowhere and everywhere, straddling worlds, and transcribes this otherness in his own singular and burning tongue.
Sojourner invites one to get lost. Like any good adventure, these stories and poems lead us far from the beaten path & madding crowd with spare poetry, mad, rollicking prose, and journal entries. The landscape keeps changing, so we keep turning the page, to see what's around the next corner.
Spend a moment with Lee in Amsterdam (in his story "Sudden Death") and see if you don't want to stick around for more:
"The canals are concentric circles forming rings around the old city center -- never touching it, or each other - that empty out into the swamp behind the city's back: the Single, the Man's Canal, the Prince's Canal, the King's Canal. The straight streets fan out like goosefeet on his map [...] Having read Poe when younger, Ballard, and Orwell, having bought all the Joy Division twelve-inch singles for every non-LP B-side, having owned an exclusively red-and-black wardrobe, he glares at the red lights above the women in their windows, or the closed red curtains that signify occupancy, brightly dressed tourists browsing, cars backed up on the narrow cobblestone streets, bicycles negotiating the interstices. Pedestrians knock knees against bumpers and fenders, cameras clicking, smelling the piss rising up from the doorways -- he begins to see the city as Prospero's castellated abbey in 'The Masque of the Red Death.'"
Sojourner will leave you with telltale bruises, scrapes, and a damn good buzz.
With an erudite punk rock sensibility, Lee writes of belonging nowhere and everywhere, straddling worlds, and transcribes this otherness in his own singular and burning tongue.
Sojourner invites one to get lost. Like any good adventure, these stories and poems lead us far from the beaten path & madding crowd with spare poetry, mad, rollicking prose, and journal entries. The landscape keeps changing, so we keep turning the page, to see what's around the next corner.
Spend a moment with Lee in Amsterdam (in his story "Sudden Death") and see if you don't want to stick around for more:
"The canals are concentric circles forming rings around the old city center -- never touching it, or each other - that empty out into the swamp behind the city's back: the Single, the Man's Canal, the Prince's Canal, the King's Canal. The straight streets fan out like goosefeet on his map [...] Having read Poe when younger, Ballard, and Orwell, having bought all the Joy Division twelve-inch singles for every non-LP B-side, having owned an exclusively red-and-black wardrobe, he glares at the red lights above the women in their windows, or the closed red curtains that signify occupancy, brightly dressed tourists browsing, cars backed up on the narrow cobblestone streets, bicycles negotiating the interstices. Pedestrians knock knees against bumpers and fenders, cameras clicking, smelling the piss rising up from the doorways -- he begins to see the city as Prospero's castellated abbey in 'The Masque of the Red Death.'"
Sojourner will leave you with telltale bruises, scrapes, and a damn good buzz.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews