{"id":10505,"date":"2017-03-05T20:40:42","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T15:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/kim-fus-how-festive-the-ambulance\/"},"modified":"2023-02-14T01:20:26","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T20:20:26","slug":"kim-fus-how-festive-the-ambulance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/kim-fus-how-festive-the-ambulance\/","title":{"rendered":"A Flashing Light in the Darkness: Kim Fu’s How Festive the Ambulance<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

These poems are cinematic vignettes of time and place, written in a smooth, delicate pace. Fu\u2019s characters are each unhappy where and when they are, whether in an imaginary fairy tale, a party of poets, a roadside diner, or, as in \u201cDissection,\u201d from the book\u2019s Small Crimes of a Northern People section, a series of bodies: \u201cCut into a lobster, a crow, a mouse, \/ an ape, your mother. \/ See the economy of space inside the body, \/ a shared rented room in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

In How Festive<\/em>, Fu proves herself a rising master of the many-edged sword of metaphor and emotion. Her poems often combine deep sorrow with quiet, playful humour, leaving the reader grinning and tearful, as with the collection\u2019s title poem, where the emergency lights are \u201cruby and amber on the outer rim of a Ferris wheel \/ Carnival riders tilted up to the fireworks: Whee! Ooh. Whee! Ooh,<\/em>\u201d bringing us ultimately to \u201ctheir sweet confirmation: not-dead, not-dead, not dead<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fu\u2019s subtleties in description ease her often blunt judgments, whether they\u2019re on the vapidness of a gaggle of teenagers in a restaurant, the social isolation of city living, or on death, race, chores, love, herself, etc. Even still, Fu\u2019s language remains rich with multiple meanings in each of these tellings. Her striking, resonant whispering of details, for example, render the personal tragedy of \u201cNo-Fault Divorce \/ Breakfast\u201d heartbreakingly mundane, instructing: \u201cYou may divide the raisin toast \/ along the cinnamon line \/\/ The coffee, cleave \/ into two great, black waves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fu\u2019s elaborate layering of metaphors can, at times, work against itself. In \u201cLanding Gear,\u201d she sews quilts of farmland and hairs and seams and mountain ranges and strolling cats together into a single, messy, hissing ball of description. Leaps in correlation in several of the poems are either a bound too far, or based on an incorrect assumption of shared insider knowledge.<\/p>\n

The resulting frustration and confusion are discordant, especially following other poems that fulfill their promise of insight and empathy, as in \u201cSouth of Maryland,\u201d where each subsequent rereading delivers yet more meaning: \u201cWhite snakes that slither and nest, cross distances, grow vast. \/ They reveal the shape of a pillarless cathedral \/ with ample time for your slow-motor mind \/ to recognize grey<\/em> and purple<\/em>; long, long lightening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everywhere, for Fu, there is something hidden beyond the lights: a seething emotion, a spider, a meaning inside another meaning. Something at the core of the contemporary world scalds her characters\u2019 souls.<\/p>\n

The illnesses of modernity may be too nebulous for Fu to diagnose with names, but the lights of her ambulance illuminate them beautifully.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

AJ Dolman’s<\/strong> poetry and fiction have been published throughout Canada and the U.S., including, recently, in Matrix Magazine<\/em>, Bywords.ca<\/em>, Triangulation: Lost Voices<\/em>, and On Spec<\/em>. Her second poetry chapbook is Where No One Can See You<\/em>. Twitter: @ajdolman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

MISERABLY MODERN? WELL, IT MAKES GOOD POETRY<\/a>!
\n<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadian-born Seattleite Kim Fu has followed up her much-lauded debut novel, For Today I Am a Boy<\/em> (HarperCollins, 2014), with a debut collection of poetry. With it, she proves she is no less afraid of portraying emotion and complexity as a poet than as a novelist.<\/p>\n

How Festive the Ambulance<\/em> is divided into five sections, each themed around the relationships her miserably modern characters have with different parts of the world around them, from animals, to loved ones (and things), to culture, to place. Despite the divisions, each poem throughout the book is wound in a tangle of influences and affects, all tied to contemporary lifestyles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2679,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"10349,10555,10645,10423","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1410,1705],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[202],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[3128],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10505"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}