How Festive the Ambulance by Kim Fu

How Festive the Ambulance Reviews

• 
  Laura

  It took me a long time to finish this little book of poetry. I didn't want it to end, and so I read it frugally, savouring every poem. Kim's writing is rich without being superfluous. There's a sharpness to her choice of words that kept me effortlessly absorbed. They elicited strong visuals and fully fleshed out settings.
  
  I highly recommend reading How Festive The Ambulance. If you think poetry isn't your thing, let this book change your perspective.
  
  On a personal note, Kim is a longtime friend of my husband and I. Poem II. on page 47 had my heart in my throat. I was touched to the point of tears to discover we had made it into Kim's book. I'll never forget the unreal and magical feeling of reading it for the first time.
• 
  Kaeli Wood

  Risky to read during silent reading in gr10 English class bc I’m at the front of the class, modelling silent reading, and I want to CRY. Not sad cry, like “poetry rules omg” cry.
  
  The first part of this book reminds me of Angela carter. But like, better. I don’t know what to say about this collection except I love it.
• 
  guiana!

  ⤳ 2.5
  
  hm, this one had a lot of content I didn't understand, which is perfectly fine!—poetry is personal to some readers, the opposite to some—though I do think this needed something to tie the whole collection together. also, if I had understood the context (with my own research or otherwise) of the majority of them, I'm sure I would have cherished the experience more.
• 
  Matthew

  Lots of good stuff. I especially liked Cradle Song and Four Teenage Girls at a Vietnamese Restaurant.
• 
  Bina Artiste

  I was sad when the book ended, wanted to read more. Glad to see more Canadian poetresses! And I am the first one reviewing on here.. Looking forward to reading Kim Fu's novel, For Today I Am a Boy.
• 
  Prairie Fire Review of Books

  From prairiefire.ca. Review by Spenser Smith.
  
  How Festive the Ambulance, Kim Fu’s debut book of poetry, is a startling exploration of the banality of modern life.
  
  With dark and exacting language, Fu dissects life’s excess of moments and uncovers a consistency of destruction and disappointment.
  
  Throughout How Festive the Ambulance, Fu sketches human and mythical characters to showcase the parallels of discontent in both real and imagined worlds. In “The Unicorn Princess”, Fu ironically imagines a unicorn (the standard in make-believe creatures) who desperately attempts to avoid her reality. The unicorn tries on wedding gowns at a bridal shop while bragging about “her imaginary fiancé” and describes her fictional wedding venue by reciting gaudy language from a wedding magazine (15). She revels in going to open houses to “riffle through drawers”, “sniff the sheets”, and “pocket tchotchkes” (15). As Fu masterfully reveals through the juxtaposition of fairy tale and pop culture, the unicorn is a reflection of the strangers’ life she intrudes upon:
  
  She knows these people, as she knows the ones
  on the Home & Garden channel:
  sledgehammering through walls and revealing
  their sodden, infested, but fixable souls. (15)
  
  Fu’s dismal description of women’s roles in the natural world is unsettling. “Salt” tells the story of a young woman who reaches puberty at eighteen and is “preparing, ancestrally, to squat down and bear/fruit” (33). She finds herself “pissing on a stick in a mall bathroom stall/wishing her body were filled with sand” (33). Next, she is on an “anonymous bus/out toward the wasteland”, a metaphor for travelling to an abortion clinic, as she watches “skulls smaller than her palm/and the cracked bones of shapeless girls” (33).
  
  The progression of the young woman’s circumstance is fleeting—puberty, pregnancy, abortion. Her life feels like a series of involuntary events and Fu partly achieves this effect through the quick pace of the poem. The young woman exists simply as an organism programmed to reproduce, and despite her deep aversion, she succumbs to her “humid, fertile darkness:/the black soil of equatorial Amazon.” (33). In “Lifecycle of the Mole Woman”, Fu uses the same terrene language. A mole woman marries a mole prince amongst “towers” of “inflamed earth”, “the black forest of a black forest cake” (16). At the wedding, the mole prince “tenderly gouges out” the mole woman’s eyes (16).
  
  Fu is also interested in what the use of language says about our existence. While examining a restaurant menu in “Chicken the Size of Beach Balls”, the speaker describes English as having “serifs and curlicues/more complex than the Mayan’s” (36). The speaker then asks the reader to imagine “classrooms of tomorrow” when children will be asked to study a culture that:
  
  honoured their gods of plenty by describing ingredients
  in lush language, recounting which chickens ran free, which ones ate
  flax, which ones lived and died in the dark. (36)
  
  
  
  In what feels like a found poem by eavesdropping, “Four Teenage Girls at a Vietnamese Restaurant” chronicles the seemingly futile conversation of four teenage girls:
  
  are those Nike no Lululemon
  they have this v that makes your butt look awesome
  and they would hide a thong
  did you say you can see my thong
  no I said they would hide a thong (60)
  
  Yet, by examining How Festive the Ambulance as a whole, the conversation (and by extension, the existence) of these young girls is on par with every other character in the book. Whether you’re an escapist unicorn, assaulted mole woman, or Lululemon consumer, life is equally unyielding and absurd.
  
  How Festive the Ambulance is a sombre, engrossing read. The book contains a wild mix of dread and humour, and I was often left unsure what to feel. Fu is unreserved in her approach, yet her bluntness holds a level of complexity and metaphor that makes each reread of a poem very rewarding.
• 
  John Stiles

  How Festive the Cultural Acclimation?
  If it be the job of the poet to capture the zeitgeist of the moment or reflect the feeling of the times in the same way that Shakespeare captured Jacobean society (or more certainly the language of Elizabethan England) or the way that the Psalms captured Biblical times then a modern poet must capture modern times surely? In How Festive the Ambulance, an incisive stab at the quest to be heard...
  
  Full Review
• 
  Nora

  Poetry is not for me. This would’ve been a one star had I not liked “Salt” so much. I feel like these are probably good, but I just wasn’t a fan. I liked Fu’s short story collection, though, so maybe I’ll check out more of her work.
• 
  Marta Kule

  I have no idea WTF I just read, but it was awesome!
• 
  Kimberley

  3.5- some portions were outstanding and some I fell asleep during.
• 
  irene

  Es un poemario curioso, las temáticas raras y la ironía (?) de algunos poemas fueron mi parte favorita. Pero, hasta ahí, la verdad.
• 
  Anna

  Not an easy collection to read, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Desperate, visceral, stinking of the human body in all of its uncomfortable iterations, Fu peels back the layers that we usually put up to protect ourselves, and lays bare the sometimes-direst moments of a life.
• 
  Kim

  My gateway drug to a collector's mentality. Say that you're ill - not a poet.